Funding roundup: Haun Ventures backs an onchain risk management firm

Let’s kick off this week’s funding round-up with a Series A round, topping $55 million, for onchain risk management firm Chaos Labs. 

Haun Ventures led the round, with PayPal Ventures, Wintermute Ventures and Coinbase Ventures all participating.

1/ We're excited to announce our $55M Series A led by @HaunVentures alongside @lightspeedvp, @FPrimeCapital, @wintermute_t, @galaxyhq, @PayPal, @slow, @TheSpartanGroup, and more.

Our company is named after the problem we’re trying to solve.

The Chaos Labs mission is simple:… pic.twitter.com/1k50EHT0Tc

— Chaos Labs (@chaos_labs) August 15, 2024

Diogo Mónica, who just joined Haun earlier this year, spoke to Blockworks about his first deal with the VC firm and why he was putting money where his mouth is when it comes to Chaos. 

Plus, he explained, it doesn’t hurt to find a “deal that I fell in love with. It’s totally up my alley. It was quite lucky.”

With his background as a security engineer, the co-founder of Anchorage said he’s been focused on the backend throughout his career. 

“So it’s this core, fundamental portion of on-chain finance that we don’t talk about much, but is actually what’s building like the the ability of these protocols to survive and risk management is extremely important, regardless of the fact that users should never see it. Users should never be thinking about security. They should just use a product and the product works,” Mónica said. 

Per a press release, the team at Chaos Labs hopes to “empower decentralized applications with contextualized data to increase capital efficiency and achieve performance parity with their centralized counterparts.”

“So…one of the cool risk innovations is these risk oracles that they’re coming to market with that allow these protocols just behave better when in terms of risk,” Mónica said. 

Chaos Labs is currently utilized by 20 protocols including Jupiter and Aave.

As for the broader crypto space, Mónica explained that he’s seeing a slowdown in the L1s and L2s, but founders have remained “convicted about the space.”

“There’s lots of innovation, lots of creativity, regulatory arbitrage, technology, different types of go to market…And coming into a rate cut cycle is going to be extremely important because it sort of upsets the [momentum] that [crypto’s] created, and removes a lot of the revenue from the current winners of the marketplace,” he further explained.

Other notable rounds: 

• Sahara Labs, a decentralized AI blockchain platform, announced that it raised $43 million in a round co-led by Pantera Capital, Polychain and Binance Labs. 
• Crypto infrastructure firm Parfin revealed a Series A raise of $10 million in a round led by ParaFi Capital, with Framework Ventures participating. 
• Holonym Foundation, which focuses on digital identity security, said it raised $5.5 million in a seed round led by Finality Capital. Paper Ventures coles with round, with other participants including Draper Dragon and Arrington Capital.
• Orderly Network, a Web3 liquidity layer, announced a strategic investment topping $5 million from the likes of OKX Ventures, Manifold Trading and Nomad Capital. 
• Kem, an app for financial management primarily in the Middle East and Africa, received a $3 million strategic investment from Tether.

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