Weekly Recap

Total funding has rebounded from last week’s abnormally low amount, increasing 251% from $44 million to $154 million. Infrastructure was the leading category, raising $99 million across 13 deals. This week’s largest deal fell into the Infrastructure bucket; 0G Labs, a former Deal of The Week, raised $40 million in a Seed round, bringing its total funding to $75 million. From a deal stage perspective, funding was concentrated in Seed rounds, totaling $64 million and comprising 41% of the total. Pre-seed rounds were the most popular, tallying six deals for a total of $14 million in funding. There were two Series B rounds completed this week, bringing the year-to-date count to 11. With the potential for clearer regulatory guidelines, it’ll be interesting to see if there is an uptick in later-stage funding rounds over the next few quarters.

Funding by Category

Funding by Stage

Deal of the Week

Notabene, a crypto anti-money laundering platform, raised $14.5 million in a Series B round led by DRW Venture Capital, with participation from Apollo, Nextblock, ParaFi Capital, and Wintermute. Notabene is one of eleven companies to complete a Series B financing round in 2024. Notabene is striving to become the SWIFT of crypto payments, facilitating a global payments network for compliant institutions and banks. The funding will be used to accelerate Notabene’s mission of integrating crypto payments into the everyday global economy.

Why Is This Deal of the Week?

There is an anti-money laundering regulation enacted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) known as the “Travel Rule,” which requires virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to securely collect counterparty information during crypto transactions over a certain threshold. Additionally, VASPs must screen customers for sanctions and perform due diligence on the counterparty VASP. The goal is to prevent terrorist financing and money laundering. Many VASPs have struggled to build in-house solutions to ensure full Travel Rule compliance.

Notabene’s SafeTransact is the solution, providing a fully integrated suite of tools for end-to-end compliance of the Travel Rule. SafeTransact offers a holistic view of transactions, allowing platforms to automate real-time decision-making, perform counterparty sanctions screening, identify self-hosted wallets, and ensure seamless Travel Rule compliance. Additionally, Notabene’s Network provides a comprehensive view of all global VASPs and their real-time compliance status, allowing customers to easily prevent transacting with non-compliant counterparties.

Notabene has over 165 companies using its SafeTransact platform, including big names like Copper, Robinhood, OKX, and Ramp. Notabene has expanded its VASP network to over 1,200 companies, increasing its coverage to over 10,000 assets and 300 wallets. Notabene is rapidly expanding its footprint, now operating in over 80 jurisdictions and processing more than half a trillion dollars in transaction volume. Notabene expects that it will see an acceleration in growth as digital assets continue to integrate into the global economy.

Selected Deals

0G Labs, a modular AI blockchain, raised $40 million in a Seed round from investors, including Hack VC, Delphi Digital, OKX Ventures, and others. 0G Labs previously raised $35 million in one of the largest crypto pre-seed rounds in past years. In addition to its seed round, 0G Labs also raised $250 million from public investors through its node sale. 0G is building a decentralized AI operating system (dAIOS) to power the future of AI. The operating system is being built on 0G, also known as ZeroGravity, a modular AI blockchain built to scale and meet massive demand for AI infrastructure. 0G is developing a suite of products built on 0G, including a data availability layer, a data storage layer, and a decentralized service layer to connect AI providers and end-users. 0G claims to be 50,000x faster, 100x cheaper, and 1000x faster storage than its competitors. 0G believes that for a truly frictionless ecosystem, users need a modular decentralized system to distribute hardware resources to support any on-chain use case.

Wyden, a trading infrastructure platform, raised $16.9 million in a Series B round led by Truffle Capital, with participation from Sygnum, C3 Venture Capital, PostFinance, and FiveT. Wyden provides complete trade lifecycle solutions for digital asset institutions. Wyden just launched its flagship product, Wyden Infinity, a cloud-native platform that automates the digital asset trade lifecycle, including order and execution management, custody, smart order routing, trading, accounting, and settlement. Wyden will leverage the fresh capital to drive its strategic expansion and enter new markets, including onboarding new banks, brokers, and exchanges. Wyden has a regulatory-compliant focus, operating in markets with established regulatory frameworks, including those in the EU, Switzerland, Turkey, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Wyden hopes to have an additional 20 banks in its network by the end of 2025.

BetHog, a crypto casino and sportsbook, raised $6 million in funding in a seed round led by 6thMan Ventures, with participation from Bullpen Capital, Karatage, Advancit Capital, and others. BetHog was founded by the creators of FanDuel, one of the largest sports betting platforms in the U.S. They hope to bring their expertise in traditional gaming to crypto, innovating on the traditional casino industry by bringing unique, highly visual games to market along with a stellar VIP program. BetHog offers multiple casino game titles, table games, and sports betting. BetHog has created some of its own original games, such as HODL and Thermonuclear Boars, which are variants of Crash and Mines. BetHog is built on Solana, which will serve as the casino’s currency to begin operations, with plans to add additional tokens down the line.