Crypto Venture Capital Landscape: Top 10 Newly Funded Projects in April 2023

According to DeFi Llama, 60 crypto projects raised capital in May. The total capital raised month over month decreased, with $547,25 million in April compared to $789,15 million in March (30.6% drop).

This drop can be described by companies who have raised at a very high valuation in 2021 or early 2022 that are now coming back into the market trying to do extensions at the same valuations, which are not going through. So a lot of companies are doing their down rounds

Now let's turn our spotlight to the rockstars of April. There were some clear winners in the capital-raising arena. In the spirit of the times, projects flexing their muscle in roll-up protocols or championing treasury management tools were attracting substantial interest and capital. Meanwhile, the once star-studded NFT platforms and Order Book DEXes found themselves in the unusual position of wallflowers, struggling to pull in the same levels of capital as they once did.

Get ready, as we are about to introduce the top ten projects that successfully navigated the market turbulence to raise capital in April. These ventures serve as clear evidence that even in the face of fluctuating market dynamics, innovation and determination still have the potential to triumph. Let's delve into their narratives and acknowledge their accomplishments.

Pear Protocol

Pear Protocol is a decentralized platform that offers one-click pairs trading, enabling users to trade the latest narratives by choosing one token to be long and one to short with leverage. The platform allows users to trade assets like BTC and ETH against one another in a single trade, providing deep liquidity through on-chain Oracle-based partners. Pear Protocol is fully composable and self-custodial, building at DeFi and NFTs.

Pear Protocol aims to streamline pair trading and enable users to use the equity in their portfolios to support multiple positions simultaneously. Pear Protocol's innovative approach to on-chain spread trading allows leveraged long and short positions on different assets, making it easier for users to create unique narrative-based trades quickly. The product or token is not yet live, the team plans to launch their product in Q2.

Pear Protocol recently secured $1.25 million in a seed funding round. Pear Protocol will be launching on Ethereum layer-2 Arbitrum and was backed by investors from Flow Ventures, RNR Capital, Portico Ventures and JY Capital, among others. The funds raised will be utilized to expedite the continued development and imminent deployment of the platform's innovative offerings.

Coinflow

Coinflow is a web3 payment stack provider that offers a payment solution for Web3 companies to accept traditional payment methods and payout their customers by converting cryptocurrency to fiat. The company provides a crypto payment gateway that allows users to receive, store, and pay in cryptocurrency, all in one place.

Coinflow also offers a powerful application to manage and track expenses, helping users understand where they spend the most and optimize their spending. Coinflow is a leading crypto eCommerce payment processing platform that enables users to take full advantage of a new era of online payments.

The company's platform is built using the latest technology and supported by industry-leading insurance-backed custodian services to ensure that all funds are always safe. Coinflow Labs' innovative web3 payments infrastructure solution aims to provide a new era of online payments.

Coinflow Labs recently closed a $1.45 million pre-seed funding round. The funding round was co-led by Reciprocal Ventures and Jump Crypto, with participation from other investors. The funds will be used to develop Coinflow Labs' web3 payment infrastructure solutions.

Teahouse Finance

Teahouse Finance is a DeFi investment platform that offers decentralized asset management and strategy solutions. It aims to solve the concentrated liquidity provision problem on Uniswap V3. The platform provides seven DeFi strategy vaults to help users invest and profit easily. The platform optimizes trading fees while limiting temporary loss by dynamically altering liquidity pool ranges and hedge positions.

Teahouse Finance plans to democratize DeFi by providing secure and flexible asset management solutions that enable businesses and investors to diversify their portfolios while maintaining security and flexibility. The company also plans to launch Teahouse Private Vaults, an enterprise-ready B2B product aimed at democratizing DeFi. Teahouse Finance believes that DeFi works as a trustless model and must provide excellent transparency and convenience.

Teahouse Finance has raised $5 million in funding to further its mission. Teahouse Finance plans to launch their asset management solution in Q2. Teahouse Finance's funding round of $5 million, led by AppWorks with $2 million. Other participants in the round include Pantera Capital, NGC Ventures, and Perpetual Protocol. The company plans to launch Teahouse Private Vaults in Q2 and provide on-chain investment options after the trust collapse in centralized exchanges. The funding will also be used to address DeFi's concentrated liquidity issue. Teahouse Finance aims to democratize DeFi through initiatives like Perpetual Protocol and Chainlink.

Thesanuts Finance

Thetanuts Finance is a multi-chain structured products protocol that offers automated options strategies to generate diversified high organic yield for users. The platform caters to a wide customer base, including option traders, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), market makers, and other liquidity providers. Users can earn a yield on major cryptocurrencies through Thetanuts Finance's offerings.

The platform is designed to offer treasury management for DAOs and help retail traders earn organic yields on their assets. Thetanuts Finance simplifies the process of options trading, making previously complex instruments easy for any investor to access and empowering users to monetize volatility in a risk-adjusted manner. The platform is currently in Beta and plans to go live in Q3.

The company recently closed a $17 million funding round led by Polychain Capital, Hyperchain Capital, and Magnus Capital. The funds will create new partnerships with layer 1 and layer 2 networks, liquidity providers, blockchain foundations, market makers, and exchanges. Thetanuts Finance aims to push the boundaries for structured DeFi products and derivatives, expanding access to more diverse asset classes and driving meaningful progress in the Decentralized Options Vaults sector.

Satsuma

Satsuma is a blockchain data indexing platform that provides a developer tool for building applications on top of real-time blockchain data. The company's product lets developers take decoded data from multiple chains, customize it for their use cases, and access it through API endpoints. Satsuma's platform allows users to search and analyze blockchain data in real time, making tracking and understanding crypto transactions easier. The company uses open-source technology from The Graph, a decentralized protocol for querying and indexing data from blockchain networks.

Satsuma is a business entity with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and is not a decentralized protocol (so no token). The company provides a developer tool for building applications on top of real-time blockchain data, which allows developers to access blockchain data through API endpoints. The company's suite of products eliminates the resource-intensive obstacles associated with building on top of on-chain data so that teams can return to efficient product innovation cycles. The company's clients include Decentraland, Aragon, and Syndicate.

Satsuma recently raised $5 million in a seed funding round co-led by Initialized Capital and Archetype. The company was founded in 2022 and aims to make decentralized finance more accessible by providing a comprehensive index of blockchain data.

Astria

Astria is a middleware blockchain that introduces a shared sequencer network to tackle roll-up centralisation issues. It replaces centralized sequencers, allowing multiple rollups to share a single decentralized network of sequencers that is simple and permissionless to join.

Astria's shared sequencer network accepts transactions from various rollups, orders them into a single block, and writes them to the base layer without executing them. This enables fast block confirmations, atomic cross-rollup composability, and out-of-the-box censorship resistance while retaining each rollup's sovereignty. Astria is also developing the Astria EVM, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) powered by the shared sequencer network, which will serve as the flagship EVM for the modular blockchain Celestia's data availability layer. Their EVM is still in development with no current timeline for release.

Astria is a modular blockchain that recently raised $5.5 million in seed funding to develop its shared sequencer network. The funding round was led by Maven 11 and included contributions from prominent crypto investment firms, such as 1kx, Delphi Ventures, and Figment Capital.

M^Zero Labs

M^Zero Labs is a decentralized finance (DeFi) development company focusing on creating a decentralized network for institutional participants to link assets to a decentralized infrastructure for on-chain monetary transactions. The platform will feature shared on-chain governance and settlement, interacting seamlessly with best-practice asset onboarding in a regulatory-friendly setup.

M^Zero Labs will likely generate revenue through fees associated with using their platform and services. The company aims to take an institutional-grade approach to DeFi, targeting large, sophisticated institutions rather than the general public. M^Zero Labs may also introduce a governance token, which could be another potential source of revenue.

M^Zero Labs recently raised $22.5 million in a funding round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from other investors such as Road Capital, AirTree, Standard Crypto, The SALT Fund, ParaFi Capital, Distributed Capital, Kraynos Capital and Mouro Capital. The platform is still in development and the funds raised will continue building the company's infrastructure and supporting ongoing product development. M^Zero Labs aims to establish its solution as a decentralized money middleware, connecting assets in the global financial system with decentralized applications.

OPsideZK

OpsideZK is a platform that provides ZK-Rollup as a Service (ZK-RaaS) solutions for the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. ZK-Rollup is a Layer 2 scaling solution that bundles multiple transactions into a single proof, verified on the Ethereum blockchain, offering increased security, trustlessness, and faster withdrawals compared to other rollup solutions.

OpsideZK offers general-purpose and application-specific Rollup SDKs, allowing developers to create their zk-rollups. The platform features a three-layer architecture, including a base chain, based rollup, and a decentralized prover. OpsideZK also introduces a hybrid consensus mechanism that combines Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Work (PoW). OPside is releasing their pre-alpha testnet in May.

OpsideZK recently received an investment of $4 million in a seed funding round. The funding was led by Web3.com Ventures, with participation from other notable investors in the crypto industry. The funds will be used to develop and enhance the platform's infrastructure, enabling faster transaction processing and lower fees for on-chain applications such as games and social networks.

Steer Protocol

Steer Protocol is a decentralized computing protocol designed to address the challenges of infrastructure and data in building, securing, and deploying decentralized web3 backends. The platform enables developers to write cross-chain apps using over 20 programming languages, connect to reliable external data sources, and execute on any blockchain using the provided infrastructure. Steer Protocol aims to eliminate entry barriers and roadblocks for Web3 developers, fostering accessibility and innovation within the ecosystem. Developers can build various applications using Steer Protocol, such as yield-based strategies, secure on-chain operations, automated swaps, L1/L2 transfers, oracles, etc.

Steer Protocol specializes in off-chain computing, complex and dynamic operations, and data processing apps, offering democratized access to create apps, app engines, and data connectors and monetize them. The platform also focuses on reducing gas costs and boosting scalability by enabling developers to execute off-chain logic for on-chain execution.

Steer Protocol successfully raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Druid Ventures, with participation from Republic Capital, Big Brain Holdings, and other notable crypto VC firms and angel investors. The funds raised will expedite the continued development and imminent deployment of Steer Protocol's innovative offerings, which are expected to provide significant benefits to DeFi projects and stakeholders across the board.

INTMax

INTMax is an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup network that provides a completely stateless Layer 2 with interoperability. The algorithm of INTMax was developed in 2021. INTMax is designed to be the most secure hyperscaling solution in Ethereum, with Liveness/Safety Separation that maintains the same security assumption as Layer 1, making INTmax no less secure than zkRollups.

The platform is a unique layer 2 rollup network that provides the highest performance among layer 2 networks, able to scale 1 billion users in a single day. The scalability of INTMax's technology is ten times more scalable than Ethereum. INTMax's protocol can solve many problems for Ethereum layer 1, which currently has a limit of 100,000 maximum users per day.

The innovative algorithm of INTmax enables it to dramatically speed up the verification process, allowing for incredible scalability and over 10,000 TPS. INTmax exponentially increases efficiency compared with other ZKP projects, enabling token transfers with near-zero gas costs. The project aims to build a scaling platform that achieves hyper-scaling and privacy at the same time.

INTMax recently raised $5 million in a seed round led by Hashkey Capital and Bitscale Capital, with participation from other investors. The funds will be used to develop further INTmax's stateless zkRollup project, which aims to build a universal financial infrastructure. INTmax's stateless protocol allows for hyper-efficient token transfers while leveraging the virtual machines and smart contract functionality from other L2s via the state. The company aims to provide the highest performance among layer 2 networks, able to scale 1 billion users in a single day.

April Crypto Venture Capital

In April 2023, there were about 60 cryptocurrency projects that got money from investors.This number is the same as the month before. But, the total amount of money they got was less.They got $547.25 million in April, which is a 30.6% drop from the $789.15 million they got in March. This downward trend in funding value can be attributed to companies that had previously raised funds at very high valuations in 2021 or early 2022 are now reentering the market attempting to do extensions at the same valuations. These attempts are not going through, resulting in a number of companies opting for down rounds. This is indicative of a healthy correction in the market, as valuations are becoming more in line with the actual performance and potential of the companies.

What can we expect next month? We think these trends will keep going, but changes in the economy could cause some shifts. Things like political problems around the world and new rules for crypto could make the market uncertain. This might affect how much money is invested and how many deals are made. In addition, the broader economic conditions, including inflation rates, interest rates, and the performance of traditional financial markets, will also influence investor sentiment and activity in the crypto venture capital space.
But there's still a lot of excitement about blockchain and DeFi, and more and more industries are using digital assets. This should keep investors interested. So, despite some ups and downs in the short term, things still look good for cryptocurrency investments in the long term.

Read further for the top crypto venture capital in May