It must be the season for fundraising in the decentralized finance industry. Another protocol, Syndicate, is raking in big bucks from venture capital firms.
The latest DeFi protocol to get the attention of major investors is the community-driven investing platform Syndicate. In an announcement on August 31, Syndicate revealed that it had raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
A number of the usual DeFi investors also took part. These included IDEO CoLab Ventures, Electric Capital, CoinFund, Scalar Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Aave, Protocol Labs, Delphi INFINFT, and True Ventures.
There were also more than 150 notable founders, operators, creators, and individuals pledging investments in the venture. These included Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, actor Ashton Kutcher, and Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., aka Snoop Dogg.
Syndicate aims to “democratize investing” by empowering communities to raise and invest capital in an environment that is traditionally only available to the big financial players.
Democratizing investing
The protocol wants to make investing available to everyone by creating a social network that blends with an investing portal. Syndicate was founded in 2021, “with the eventual goal of transforming how the world creates and shares value.”
The funding will be used to accelerate the development of a DAO, it added. This will happen with a view to integration with Web3 projects and fintech startups.
Overall, several have already launched on Syndicate. These include Komorebi, a platform investing in female and non-binary founders, Audacity, which invests in Black and African founders, Fiat Lux funding scientific research, and non-fungible token investment platform Delphi INFINFT.
Syndicate stated that it is currently working with dozens of new communities such as CityDAO, which democratizes access to land, in order to launch in the coming months as part of a private beta rollout.
According to the official website, the software has had two security reviews by ConsenSys, two security audits by Trail of Bits, and formal verification from Certora. It has also put up a million-dollar bug bounty.
VCs hungry for DeFi
Syndicate is the latest in a long list of DeFi and investment platforms that have raised funding in recent months.
For example, OffChain Labs just launched its long-awaited Ethereum Layer 2 platform Arbitrum One this week after raising $120 million.
Parallel Finance announced a $22 million funding round this week. It aims to bring more DeFi to the Polkadot ecosystem. In addition, decentralized cybersecurity incentive network Hats announced a $3.5 million seed funding round yesterday.