Weekly Recap

Weekly funding fell by 34% from $126 million to $83 million, while deal count rose approximately 22% from 18 to 22. Infrastructure was the leading category, totaling $51 million across nine deals and comprising 61% of total funding. CeFi logged its second consecutive week of two deals, including Caliza’s $8.5 million investment round supporting its mission to provide cross-border remittances leveraging stablecoins. Web3 and Gaming deal flow has been suppressed thus far in July, collectively totaling $29 million in funding across 13 deals. Series A rounds totaled $38 million, representing slightly less than half of the total amount across only three deals. In contrast, Seed rounds were the most popular, tallying eight deals but representing 26% of funding.

Funding by Category

Funding by Stage

Deal of the Week

Allium, a blockchain data platform, raised $16.5 million in a Series A round led by Theory Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, and Amplify Partners. Allium provides enterprise-grade, quick, and simple blockchain data for companies like Visa, Stripe, Uniswap, and Phantom to provide unique insights and power their applications. Allium will use the funding to invest in its data infrastructure and scale its go to market initiatives.

Why is This Deal of the Week?

Products, builders, and investors are only as good as the data they use in development or in their decision-making process, leading to an increased focus from crypto teams prioritizing the accessibility and quality of blockchain data. Allium is striving to be the data hub for enterprises and individuals alike, creating two different API kits: Allium Explorer and Allium Developer. Allium Explorer provides intuitive querying and visualization for data discovery and investment research, while Allium Developer provides real-time data streaming to enterprises for high-performance applications. Allium leverages AI so users can easily query its vast database and automatically generate SQL queries, removing the technical know-how usually required to pull proper data and saving users and developers enormous amounts of time. Allium offers coverage of over 40 blockchains and over 100 schemas, tailoring its solutions to its clients’ needs. Allium’s data tools are already being adopted by large industry players, powering Visa’s On-Chain Analytics Dashboard, displaying one of many use-cases Allium can provide to clients.

Selected Deals

Chainbase, an omnichain data network, raised $15 million in a Series A round co-led by Tencent Investment Group and Matrix Partners China. Other investors included Folius Ventures, Hash Global, JSquare, Mask Network, and Bodl Ventures. Chainbase aggregates blockchain data across different networks into a single platform, giving developers easy access to relevant data points for building and growing applications. Chainbase provides a data platform-as-a-service to simplify web3 development, automate indexing and querying blockchain data, and remove infrastructure overheard for builders. Chainbase is expected to launch on mainnet and release a token in Q4 of this year. Chainbase will use the funding to invest in crypto communities to better engage with developers and users and raise awareness of its platform.

Mira, a decentralized infrastructure platform, raised $9 million in a Seed round led by Framework Ventures and Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from Mechanism Capital, Accel, and others. Mira is creating decentralized machine-learning infrastructure aimed at helping developers swiftly deploy AI applications. The platform acts as a blockchain layer for the sovereign ownership of AI resources. It enables users not only to deploy AI products but also to contribute and monetize them through community-sourced workflows, incentivized evaluators, and structured knowledge graphs. Some of its features will include real-time user feedback, economic primitives for model ensembles, and adversarial systems. With the funding round, Mira is aiming to facilitate products that help developers build their own AI products and support a wide range of user engagements.

Liquidium, a peer-to-peer Bitcoin lending platform, raised $2.75 million in a Seed round from CMS Holdings, NGC Ventures, Asymmetric, Portal Ventures, and others. Liquidium is a Bitcoin DeFi protocol allowing users to borrow or lend Bitcoin using Bitcoin based assets like Ordinals and Runes as collateral. Lending is securely facilitated through Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs) and Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs) on Layer-1 Bitcoin. The funds will be used to establish Liquidium as the DeFi lending hub on Bitcoin, offering comprehensive liquidity pools to provide experiences similar to Aave.