Paradigm Leads $225M Round For Monad Labs

Hi NoRamp Community,

Daily News:

1) OpenSea Adds Support For GUNZ Blockchain on Avalanche

2) Sapien AI Raises $5M for Blockchain Data Labeling Platform

3) Paradigm Leads $225M Round For Monad Labs

4) Empower Signs Deal to Acquire Petal

5) Parafin Lands $125M Warehouse Facility From SVB & Trinity Capital

OpenSea Adds Support For GUNZ Blockchain on Avalanche:

• Gunzilla Games has integrated its GUNZ blockchain platform with OpenSea, enabling players to trade in-game items from games built on the GUNZ blockchain, which operates on an Avalanche subnet.

• OpenSea will support trading of in-game assets for Off the Grid and future games on the GUNZ network, using the GUN token for transactions.

• The collaboration aligns with Gunzilla Games' vision of giving players true ownership of digital assets, following a $30 million funding round with investors including CoinFund and the Avalanche Foundation's Blizzard Fund. Off the Grid is set to launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox later this year.

Sapien AI Raises $5M for Blockchain Data Labeling Platform

• Sapien AI, an artificial intelligence firm, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round with contributions from Primitive Ventures, Animoca Ventures, Ravikant Capital, and Yield Guild Games.

• The funding will be used to accelerate Sapien's mission of providing scalable annotation services for training AI models through its gamified data labeling platform, expanding the team and infrastructure, and improving data quality for enterprise customers.

• Venture capital funding in the Web3, gaming, AI, and crypto space has surged in the first quarter of 2024, breaking a two-year downtrend with notable increases in both total funds invested and the number of projects receiving funding.

  

  Source: Blockworks

Paradigm Leads $225M Round For Monad Labs:

• Monad Labs, focused on high throughput and Ethereum compatibility, announced a $225 million funding round led by Paradigm, marking the largest crypto venture round since Wormhole's $225 million raise in November of last year.

• Amid Solana's struggles with transaction processing, Monad's co-founder and CEO Keone Hon highlights their Ethereum Virtual Machine with parallel execution, aiming for quicker transaction speeds and targeting 10,000 transactions per second in its current development phase.

• Despite concerns about potential state bloat and scaling challenges, Hon is confident in Monad's scalability and its ability to support consumer crypto apps, estimating that a popular app with a million daily active users executing 50 transactions per day would require a blockchain to process 500 TPS.

Empower Signs Deal to Acquire Petal:

• Empower Finance plans to acquire Petal, a consumer credit card and FinTech company based in New York, to expand its credit offerings in the U.S., with the acquisition expected to close by the end of the second quarter.

• Empower has completed its acquisition of Cashalo, a consumer credit and lending company headquartered in the Philippines, enabling Cashalo to enter the Southeast Asian credit market.

• The acquisitions aim to harness technology and alternative data to unlock financial opportunities for underserved consumers, with Empower's CEO Warren Hogarth and Petal Co-founder Jason Rosen emphasizing the potential to alleviate credit insecurity for billions globally.

Parafin Lands $125M Warehouse Facility From SVB & Trinity Capital:

• Parafin, a fintech providing embedded financial infrastructure for growth capital to small businesses, has secured a $125 million warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Trinity Capital.

• Founded by former Robinhood employees, Parafin uses machine learning to evaluate sales performance for personalized financing solutions and has extended offers totaling $5 billion since its launch in 2020.

• The new facility will support Parafin in providing capital to merchants on platforms like Amazon and DoorDash, with plans to expand financial service offerings and supply sellers with fast and flexible financing to scale their businesses.

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