After Losing $10,000 in Crypto, Staging Labs Co-Founder Develops Solutions to Protect Digital Assets
Staging Labs secures $1.1 million to protect crypto wallets from scams, scams.
The Nova Scotia Securities Commission estimates that more than $1 billion has been lost to crypto scams in North America since 2021, representing thousands of Canadians who have been defrauded out of tens of thousands of dollars.
One of those people is François Le Nguyen, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who lost $10,000 worth of Ethereum and NFTs in a phishing attack on Discord. After this loss, he began developing a solution for crypto transactions to prevent others from experiencing what he went through.
“Our goal is to act as the ultimate line of defense for crypto, improving user security.”
– François Le Nguyen, Staging Labs
Together with former Sonos engineer and now co-founder Jake Harwood, Le Nguyen established Staging Labs to develop security solutions for digital assets. In October 2022, Staging Labs secured $1.1 million in an all-equity pre-seed funding round. The first product, called Saferoot, can identify suspicious transactions in crypto wallets and automatically transfer digital assets from a wallet to a “backup safe”.
Le Nguyen said he discovered he wasn’t the only one who had lost money to crypto scams after talking to over a hundred crypto users. “If crypto fraud persists, it’s likely that many people will shy away from using crypto,” Le Nguyen said, adding that these losses are one of the “core issues hindering the mainstream adoption of crypto.”
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According to Le Nguyen, Staging Labs focuses on the “in-flight stage” of the digital asset transaction, which occurs after a user confirms the payment.
“Our goal is to act as the ultimate line of defense for crypto, increasing user security even after the verification process has started, regardless of whether it was initiated by the user themselves or as a result of phishing and malicious activities,” he said.
Le Nguyen added that Staging Labs is actively pursuing partnerships with shipboard detection companies and will announce a collaboration in the coming weeks.
Investors in this round, which marks Staging Labs’ first raise, come largely from the blockchain space, including Flourish Ventures, AlphaGrep, and NGC Ventures, as well as angel investors and crypto entrepreneurs from ConsenSys, Coinbase, Anchorage Digital, Chainalysis, Quicknode, and Merkle Science , among others. Other participants include Mistral Venture Partners, The General Partnership, Gaingels and what the company called scouts from three firms: a16z, Kleiner Perkins and Greylock.
A number of angel investors also participated, such as Glowstick co-founder Anwar Jeffrey, as well as David Au-Yeung, co-founder of Flipp and most recently Carity.
Featured image from Unsplash.
