Portal Labs raises $5.3M seed round
Raj Parakh (middle left) is the co-founder and CEO of Portal Labs. Courtesy of Portal Labs
Portal Labs, a blockchain infrastructure company, announced Tuesday that the startup had raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by Slow Ventures.
Other investors in the round include Haun Ventures, which is led by former federal prosecutor Katie Haun, Acrew Capital, Chapter One, and individuals including Diogo Mónica, co-founder and president of prominent blockchain infrastructure firm Anchorage Digital. Raj Parekh, co-founder and CEO of Portal Labs, as well as a former member of Visa’s crypto team, declined to comment on the company’s implied valuation or current headcount.
The financial backing of Portal Labs reflects not only the continued interest in blockchain infrastructure companies amid the chill of Crypto Winter, but also the increasingly porous border between legacy financial and fintech firms and hundreds of crypto startups.
“Visa was great,” Parekh said Fortune“because I was able to get a bird’s eye view of the entire ecosystem, from applications and protocols to banks and fintechs – and then from there identify gaps and pain points.”
The “pain point” he and Portal Labs identified is how siled wallets, crypto exchanges and Web3 applications can be. Users with funds on crypto exchanges, for example, cannot easily withdraw tokens on the exchange and use them to play, say, the latest Web3 game. Portal’s developer kit provides these games and exchanges with “portals” to other areas of crypto.
Parekh declined to provide further details about Portal’s current customer base.
“The barriers to access this emerging ecosystem are high — both for businesses and consumers,” Will Quist, a partner at Slow Ventures, said in a statement. He believes Portal’s infrastructure will “help onboard the next wave of users into Web3.”
In addition to Parekh, who co-founded Visa’s crypto team, other employees of financial titans have also recently struck out on their own, hoping to cash in on the trillion-dollar crypto market. Another Visa crypto alumnus, Daniel Mottice, raised $7 million in August for his own Web3 startup, Ansible Labs. And banking titans are also backing blockchain startups, including JPMorgan, which led a $20 million funding round for Ownera in September 2022.
“You’re going to see a bigger trend of really strong payments people and crypto people coming together to build really compelling products and companies,” Parekh said Fortune.
Portal Labs joins a number of other infrastructure companies hoping to solve, or at least improve, interoperability between blockchains and decentralized applications. One of Portal Labs’ closest competitors, Parekh said, is Web3Auth.
