Funding summary: Around $300 million poured into crypto projects last week

Over $300 million in funding poured into crypto companies this past week.

Ex-Meta Platforms employees raised $150 million in funding for Aptos Labs, a blockchain startup that wants to make transactions faster and cheaper. The Palo Alto-based company was founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Chin, former Meta employees who worked on the Diem cryptocurrency project, which fell apart earlier this year due to regulatory difficulties.

The startup had already reached unicorn status in March, and this new funding is speculated to nearly double its valuation.

Blockchain security company Halborn also raised significant capital for its Series A led by Summit Partners.

“We’re fully bootstrapped and raised $0 up until this Series A,” Halborn co-founder Rob Behnke told Blockworks.

The $90 million the company received will be used to “launch more blockchain security automation products for the Web3 builder world,” Behnke said. Despite bear market conditions, “we also plan to hire an additional 100 people over the next 12 months.”

“There have been a number of challenging crypto headlines in the market recently. In our view, this will result in a necessary separation of the ‘good ideas’ from the ‘bad ones,'” Matt Hamilton, CEO of Summit Partners, told Blockworks.

“We believe companies that add value to their customers will be rewarded and survive; those that don’t add value or engage in pure speculation probably won’t,” Hamilton said.

Halborn wasn’t the only company to raise a successful Series A. Decentralized crypto exchange Hashflow also announced that it had secured $25 million from several venture capitalists, including Jump Crypto, Wintermute and GSR, bringing its valuation to $400 million.

This new capital will allow Hashflow to “aggressively onboard new market makers to maximize liquidity on our platform for our users,” said CEO Varun Kumar.

Other notable raises this week include:

• Developer of an AI engine for NFT content recognition, Optic – raised an $11 million seed round last week. Co-founder Andrey Doronichev told Blockworks that “we want to become a public infrastructure for all the companies out there…we’re building a layer of infrastructure that looks at every token that comes into every chain.”
• Meow, a crypto-interest offering startup, closed a $22 million Series A led by Tiger Global.
• Game-to-earn company Fitchin raised a seed round of $3.5 million and onboarded Joe McCann, founder of crypto fund Asymmetric as an official advisor.

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