Weekly Recap

Funding through the first week of March was strong, rising 10% from $162 million to $177 million. Total deal count fell 23% but was still impressive, with 31 deals. Infrastructure remains the dominant category, representing 85% of total fundraising and 61% of the deal count. DeFi tallied 26% of the deal count this week, including a $4.5 million strategic round by Blackwing, a modular blockchain for liquidation-free leverage trading. A variety of deal stages saw activity this week, with four stages tallying three or more deals. Although deal count was dispersed, 69% of funding was concentrated in the three Series A rounds this week, including the third largest deal of the year – a $73 million round closed by Zama (DotW). Seed rounds were the next most funded category, totaling $31 million across six deals.

Funding By Category

Funding by Deal Stage

Deal of the Week

Zama, an open-source cryptography company, raised $73 million in a Series A round led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs (Filecoin). Other investors included Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. The funding will be used to continue researching its cryptography tools, developing better solutions, and expanding the team. The $73 million deal represents the third-largest deal of 2024 and one of the largest ever for a French crypto company.

Why is this Deal of the Week?

In an increasingly digitized world, the protection and privacy of user data is paramount. If blockchain solutions are going to see mass adoption, products need to have privacy measures in place to protect consumers and comply with necessary regulations.

Zama is focused on building completely homomorphic encryption technology that ensures complete data confidentiality. Zama’s cofounder, Pascal Paiillier, is one of the inventors of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), widely considered one of the top cryptography technologies enabling end-to-end encryption across the entire data lifecycle. FHE technology can alleviate data privacy concerns across almost all modern applications. It allows applications to perform computations on the encrypted data itself and returns encrypted responses that only the initial user can access. Zama has built a confidential smart contract protocol called fhEVM that gives developers the tools to create privacy-preserving applications. Privacy-enabled apps will add increased utility to dApps, and developers are already experimenting with unique applications, including:

• Confidential Tokens – balances and amounts are fully encrypted, allowing companies to run payroll on-chain without revealing identities or salaries.
• Decentralized Identity – a person’s age, nationality, social security number, and credit score can be stored on-chain, enabling increased regulatory compliance, uncollateralized credit, and Sybill resistance for airdrops.
• Institutional Finance – tokenized ownership in real estate or private funds can be traded and transferred without revealing amounts or identities of other owners.
• Artificial Intelligence – Zama’s Concrete framework allows AI models to be converted to the FHE equivalent, allowing AI models to train and run inference on encrypted data.

Zama’s fhEVM can potentially become the industry standard for developers who recognize the importance and need for data encryption. fhEVM currently supports EVM-enabled blockchains but plans to expand to other networks in the future.

Selected Deals

Io.net, a Solana-based decentralized computing network, raised $30 million via a Series A led by Hack VC with participation from Multicoin Capital, 6th Man Ventures, OKX Ventures, M13, Aptos Labs, and others. The funding round values Io.net at a $1 billion FDV, with its token expected to launch next month. Io.net is striving to build the largest decentralized GPU network in the world to solve the AI compute shortage. Io.net’s cloud solution offers unlimited flexibility to leverage the world’s best GPUs and CPUs, which can be deployed in seconds and is more cost-effective, claiming to be up to 90% cheaper than the competition.

Baanx, a crypto payments platform, raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Tezos Foundation, Chiron, and British Business Bank. Baanx is one of the few crypto payment platforms authorized by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and the funding will be used to expand the company’s product offerings and expand into other countries, such as the USA. Baanx hopes to build non-custodial on-chain products that give users complete control of their assets while enabling real-world spending. On this front, Baanx recently signed a 3-year contract with Mastercard to enhance the crypto payments sector in European markets.

Utila, an enterprise-grade crypto operations platform, raised $11.5 million in a Seed round from NFX, Wing VC, and Framework Ventures. Other investors include Fasanara Digital Ventures, North Island Digital Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, among others. Utila allows institutions and developers to manage digital assets with its non-custodial, secure, and chain-agnostic wallet. Utila’s platform eliminates the complexity of institutional custody, giving companies full control of their assets via their intuitive wallet and MPC key management solution, a robust self-serve policy engine.