Point72 Ventures Led $35M Raise for Zero Hash, Gelato Network Closes $11M Round
As the third quarter of 2021 comes to an end, more funding round news continues to flow into the crypto world.
Blockworks exclusive Art by Axel Rangel
key takeaways
- Zero Hash will use the funds to continue its expansion of products offered within the DeFi and NFT space
- Gelato plans to expand into EVM-compatible layer-1s and Ethereum scaling solutions
Zero Hash raised $35 million in a Series C led by Steven Cohen’s Point72 Ventures and Gelato Network closed an $11 million Series A round led by Dragonfly Capital, the companies announced separately on Thursday.
Zero Hash is a digital assets infrastructure company that provides solutions for platforms to trade, receive, earn and reward digital assets. It powers neobanks including MoneyLion and Wirex and broker-dealers including tastyworks and TradeStation.
Additional investors in the round include NYCA Partners, DriveWealth, and others. Angel investors also participated in the round including Founder and CEO of Mercury, Immad Akhund, Founder and CEO of Deserve Kalpesh Kapadia, CEO and Founder of Digit, Ethan Bloch, and Founder and CEO of Marqeta, Jason Gardner, the company said.
Zero Hash powers 4% of all daily on-chain Ethereum transactions that flow through its infrastructure, according to a previous announcement by the company.
The company said it will use the funds to continue its expansion of products offered within the DeFi and NFT space. Zero Hash also will use the capital to expand its global licensing framework as well as strategic acquisitions, it said.
Gelato Network raises $11 million in Series A funding round
An automating smart contract protocol Gelato Network has closed its Series A for more than $11 million, the company said.
The capital raise was led by Dragonfly Capital while other investors included ParaFi Capital, Nascent, IDEO CoLab Ventures, and Stani Kulechov from Aave. The funding will be used to continue building and integrating with DeFi protocols and aggregators like Aave and Zerion, and to offer automated transactions to their users, Gelato said.
Gelato raised $1.2 million in seed funding in late 2020 led by IOSG Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Christopher Jentzsch, D1Ventures, Ming Ng, MetaCartel Ventures and The LAO, said Hilmar Orth, co-founder of Gelato, in an email to Blockworks. In total, the company has raised $12.2 million.
Gelato plans to expand into the market through targeting all the layer-1s compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and emerging layer-2s, Orth explained, aiming to become a dominant automation protocol on each.
“Demand for automated transaction executions increased significantly in the past few months,” Orth said, noting in particular that users of decentralized exchanges on layer-2s and layer-1s with lower transaction costs are driving this demand.
In the future, Gelato plans to unveil new integrations and partnerships, in addition to upgraded functionality and use-cases with its products.
Gelato Network’s native token, $GEL, is trading at $2.08, up over 11% in the past 24 hours at time of publication, according to CoinGecko.
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