- Dinari, ZAR and Fleek were the week’s winners.
- Five total projects raised capital this week, a noticeable down shift.
It was a relatively slow week in the crypto VC space.
A total of five projects were able to secure funding rounds — less than half the total of last week’s roundup, per DefiLlama. Collectively, they raised $30 million.
That brings the total raised this year to $7.5 billion.
Let’s take a look at the top three projects.
Dinari, $12.7 million
Dinari secured a Series A co-led by HackVC and BlockChange, with participation from Arete Capital, the Avalanche ecosystem fund Blizzard, F-Prime and VanEck, among others.
The company has developed a platform for trading securities like stocks and bonds onchain — the platform currently lists 105 of them available to trade.
The company uses smart contracts to represent backed securities with its own onchain product, dShares, that users trade.
The vast majority of these dShares, 89%, are held in USFR, a floating-rate Treasury exchange-traded fund.
“It can’t really be just about tokenising one-off stocks. It has to be tokenising every stock, eventually, and every asset,” Gabriel Otte, co-founder and CEO, told Fortune.
ZAR, $7 million
Payment platform ZAR “bridges the gap between cash-based economies and web3, accelerating stablecoin adoption,” according to the company.
The company has developed a cash trading system that allows users to find local merchants with whom they can exchange their stablecoins for physical currency.
The round was led by Dragonfly and co-led by VanEck, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, Solana Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures, among others.
Fleek, $5 million
Fleek raised its most recent round through a public token sale via CoinList. The firm raised a $25 million Series A round in 2022.
The startup is developing a way for anyone to create artificially intelligent influencers and agents and subsequently monetise their success. The platform charges a monthly subscription fee.
Suggestions on the site for users to experiment with include “tech reviewer,” “comedian,” “style consultant” and more.
You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.
Andrew Flanagan is a markets correspondent for DL News. Have a tip? Reach out to aflanagan@dlnews.com.
