Infrastructure Continues to Lead, and Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Raises $115M
Funding declined from $238M last week to $164M this week. Most deals (75%) were in the infrastructure vertical, which increased from $104M to $124M this week, with six total deals. The second most funded sector was Metaverse & Gaming, which rose to $23M in funding this week from no funding last week. Every other sector lagged—Web3 & NFTs had $15M in funding, DeFi had $2M, and CeFi and Mining had no deals. The largest deal this week was for Worldcoin. Worldcoin is an infrastructure-based firm aiming to provide its users with an accessible global currency, identification, and payment platform. The company secured $115M in funding through its series C round led by Blockchain Capital. Worldcoin was founded by Sam Altman, who also founded OpenAI, and the project caught lots of attention when it was founded due to its controversial eyeball scanning technology.
There was one crypto fund raised this week – Dispersion Capital raised $40M to invest in Web3 infrastructure. LPs of the firm include the venture capital arm of USDC issuer Circle, Ripple, and Alchemy’s investment arm.
Most of the 18 deals this week were early-stage – five were Seed Round and two were Pre Seed.