VC Interest in DeFi Slowly Picking Up

Funding declined this week from $280M last week to just $147M this week. Not surprisingly, most deals were infrastructure-related, something we’ve seen all month. DeFi, which has generally been one of the less funded verticals the last year, has slowly begun to see an uptick in funding. DeFi was the second highest funded vertical in the past two weeks, with $45M and $29M funded. This week’s largest deal, Thetanuts Finance, is in the DeFi vertical as well. Thetanuts Finance is a multi-chain structured products protocol and raised $17M in a round led by Polychain Capital, Hyperchain Capital, and Magnus Capital. Metaverse & Gaming was the next highest funded vertical at $22M while CeFi and Web3 & NFTs lagged, each receiving less than $10M in funding.

Most deals this week (56%) had their deal stage undisclosed, but of the disclosed deals, the majority were Seed Round, at 30%.

Deal of The Week

DFlow, a decentralized marketplace for order flow, announced a $5.5m funding round led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Coinbase, Circle, Cumberland, Wintermute, Spartan Group, and ZeePrime. The funding round was not disclosed, but this follows a $2 million seed round in early 2022 that Multicoin Capital and Framework Ventures co-led. DFlow is a DeFi protocol hoping to dec...