Venture Funding Continues Sliding Lower

Following the decrease in liquidity in the public markets, venture funding continued to drop lower this week. Weekly funding made a new low of 2022 with total deals declining from 28 deals to 24 deals and total amount funded dropping from $410M to $284M. Similar to last week, CeFi funding remained relatively strong and was the most funded segment of the week at $84M. Interestingly, Metaverse and Gaming saw a large uptick this month with $74M in total funding. NFT and Infrastructure funding each saw slight increases from last week, with funding of $26M and $46M, respectively. Web3 saw a decrease from $73M to $53M and DeFi saw the sharpest decline from $88M to $3M. There were two notable funds raised this week. Foresight Ventures raised $200M in a secondary fund to invest in private round crypto assets and True Global Ventures raised $146M to invest in Web3 projects.

The ongoing trend of early stage dealmaking continued this week. Pre-Seed and Seed deals accounted for 20% and 50% of total deals, respectively. Series A deals were 20% of total deals and Series B deals were 10% of total deals.

Deal of The Week

• Molecule, a platform where medical research projects can receive funding via decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), has raised $13 million in a seed funding round led by Northpond Ventures with Balaji Srinivasan, Backed VC, Shine Capital, and Speedinvest participating. Molecule is building a marketplace for researchers to list projects which are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) intended to signal intellectual property. Two existing projects on the platform are a Newcastle University study into molecular aging and a University of Copenhagen project into longevity. Typically, projects on Molecule receive funding via DAOs in the form of stablecoins such as USDC.

Why is This a Big Deal?

• Molecule is one of the first major projects of the nascent decentralized science movement (DeSci). DeSci operates on the idea that instead of a science ecosystem that relies on centralized bodies of research and funding, funding of research can be crowdfunded and decentralized in terms of ownership. Molecule’s founder, Tyler Golato, describes DeSci as, “it’s the idea of trying to take an industry that is anti-collaborative and monopolistic and figure out a way to open that to a broader group of people who have the most skin in the game”.  Molecule’s long-term goal is to have a thriving DeSci ecosystem that will consist of DAOs, pharmaceutical companies, and the general public investing into research projects they find meaningful.

Deals & Fundraising

Flip, an Indonesia-based consumer payments platform, raised $55 million in the second close of a Series B funding round. The round, which brings Flip’s total Series B to more than $100 million, was led by Tencent with participation from Block, Inc (formerly Square, Inc.), Insight Partners, as well as Guillaume Pousaz, Gokul Rajaram, and Michael Vaughan.

The Wildcard Alliance, a Web 3 subsidiary of independent game studio Playful Studios, has raised $46 million in Series A funding led by Paradigm. Other participants in the round included Griffin Gaming Partners, Polygon, and Venture Capitalist Sabrina Hahn.

ScienceMagic.Studios, a firm that will advise on and create digital assets for brands and talents, has raised $10 million in pre-seed funding. SM.S is a joint venture between communications agency ScienceMagic.Inc, Raoul Pal, and Delphi Digital. Investors in the round include Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Brevan Howard Digital, Liberty City Ventures, and RealVision, among others.

Crypto payment gateway, Nume Crypto,  raised $2 million in its Pre-Seed Funding Round. The round was led by Sequoia Capital India and saw participation from BEENEXT, Whiteboard Capital, and other angel investors, including Jayanti Kanani, Balaji Srinivasan, Gabby Dizon, and Sanat Rao.

Upvest, one of the few institutions in Europe owning all BaFin licenses and securities and crypto brokerage, has raised $42 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, who has had previous investments in companies such as LinkedIn and Shopify. The new funds will be used to scale and further develop and optimize the Company’s API.