Quick Take:
- Avantgarde Finance, a revolutionary DeFi asset management platform, closes $5.5 million equity round
- Blockchange Ventures, Placeholder, Jump Capital, Collaborative Fund & Acrew Capital all participated
- Capital will be used to extend Avantgarde’s empowerment of asset managers, treasury managers, dapp developers, and DAOs to professionally and compliantly manage their DeFi activities
Avantgarde Finance today announced completion of a $5.5 million Series A investment led by Blockchange Ventures, a leading digital asset investment firm, along with a network of strategic investors including Placeholder VC, Jump Capital, Collaborative Fund, Acrew Capital, Coinshares and others.
Avantgarde is building the first full service DeFi fund management platform that will deliver the ability to execute any on-chain strategy including derivatives, indexing, yield farming and alpha generation. The platform is being built utilizing the Enzyme infrastructure and other partner protocols. The services are applicable not only to DeFi entities, but also to DAOs, fund managers, treasuries and individuals.
Avantgarde’s entry into the marketplace will mean the most innovative DeFi projects will, for the first time, have access to automated, smart-contract tools to enable the administration of their portfolios. Avantgarde will also offer access to its platform to the full spectrum of individuals, investment clubs, asset managers, VC’s, institutional investors and treasurers interested in securely managing and investing in on chain assets.
“We’ve already seen the world of traditional finance get turned on its head”, said Avantgarde CEO Mona El Isa.
“Entirely new ways of investing are emerging and gaining popularity by the day, just as DAOs and large decentralized pools of capital are being created and amateur investing is exploding. The collision of these forces will require the automated management and administration of these pools of capital. Avantgarde is positioned to power that sea change.”
“We believe an entirely new class of investors is emerging, including DAOs, one person funds and coordinated investing by the masses”, said Ken Seiff, Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures.
“Much of this will likely occur on the blockchain and with digital assets. The management and administration of these new investment vehicles will very likely require new financial infrastructure and tools to replace existing legacy solutions. Avantgarde Finance appears to be at the very early stages of serving what we believe will be a massive market.”
This round follows several recent milestones for Avantgarde Finance. Since releasing the new Enzyme App in January, Assets Under Management for the protocol are up more than 115x, crossing a new all time high of $150 million in September. Avantgarde is now positioned to further develop its product and refine its services offerings in order to become more accessible to a broader audience.
“It should be clear to everyone in finance that digital assets are here to stay. From the beginning, Mona and the Avantgarde team have been committed to changing asset management forever by revolutionizing the underlying infrastructure of the industry. As more assets are tokenized, it’s going to be increasingly important for asset managers to upgrade their infrastructure to match the asset class. We believe Avantgarde and Enzyme are key to that transition.” — Joel Monegro, Placeholder Ventures.
To deliver on its commitment to build out this service suite, the company has already doubled the size of its team in recent months, and plans to double it again in the coming months.
