Funding Takes a Dive After FTX Collapse
Today we are covering both this week and last week due to Thanksgiving last Thursday. Not surprisingly, funding was low last week during the holiday and amid the FTX insolvency. Funding decreased from $280M the week of 11/18 to just $41M last week. However, we’re seeing funding starting to bounce back this week – increasing from $41M to $196M. Like we’ve seen most of the year, much of this funding came from the infrastructure segment. Infrastructure accounted for five of this week’s seventeen deals and included the largest deal of the week – a Series B round for Keyrock, which we discuss later in this report.
An interesting development this week was Binance announcing a recovery fund to assist distressed firms in the wake of the FTX collapse. Binance initially committed $1B in Binance USD ($BUSD) towards the fund, and more recently announced an additional $1B in BUSD, bringing the total fund size to over $2B. There was an additional $50M contributed by Jump Crypto, Aptos Labs, Animoca Brands, and Polygon Ventures. Currently, over 150 companies have applied for support.
The majority of deals were Seed Round the past two weeks, although we have seen an increase in strategic deals, which accounted for roughly 18% of deals last week and 12% of deals this ...