“From the Top” is an ongoing series from the Portfolio Fundraising Team, providing research and insights into the Web3/crypto fundraising market
For those of you that are busy, here’s a snapshot of a snapshot:
- There were 38 pre-seed to Series A fundraising deals in March. This is a small decrease from last month (41). The capital volume in these early-stage deals increased from February to March by 42%, rising from $214m to $304m
- DeFi has grown month on month (9% to 21%, January to March)
- The number of infrastructure projects has fallen (21% in February, 11% in January of all deals by category). However, Eigen Labs (an infra project allowing validators to restake tokens into other protocols) defied the bear market conditions and raised $50m
- The DAO-focused accelerator, Seed Club, announced a $25m fund, but otherwise no new fund activity
- Looking at early-stage investor activity (pre-seed to Series A), the two more active investors this month were Animoca and Dragonfly Capital, with both having closed three rounds
- Three notable bits of token news
- The Space ID token sale was way over-subscribed ($2.85bn in commitments but a hard cap of $2.5m). Space ID is a Web3 domain management platform that allows users to exchange, register, and manage crypto-based domain names, and the ID token can be used as a governance token on the platform.
- A great accomplishment has been made by Pixelcraft Studios, the creators behind Aavegotchi. Beginning the sale of their Aavegotchi token, GHST, in September 2020, Pixelcraft Studios closed the sale in March 2023 after raising $30m. No notable VC or prominent angel was involved in the funding meaning the entire raise came from its own community: this is landmark achievement for decentralised fundraising.
- Since its launch, the ARB token has maintained a pretty stable price floating around $1.20. The fully diluted market value has decreased by 7% since the first day of the token launch, currently over $15.8bn.
Looking at some of the March deals in the wider context of 1Q23 as a whole, there appears to be a growing trend of social network and content creation platforms in the Web3 space. For comparison, in 2022 there were 28 pre-seed to Series A deals in this vertical raising a total of $168m. In 1Q23, there were 10 companies under the same criteria that raised $126m, demonstrating a clear increase in interest for this vertical
By the way, If you missed last month’s overview for the Web3/crypto fundraising markets, you can check it out here
