Munich’s Staking Facilities Starts $25M Venture Arm, Sommelier Raises $23M

key takeaways

Staking Facilities has staked over $2.2 billion in assets and paid out $100 million in rewards
Sommelier’s software aims to stitch together multiple ecosystems so that users have an easier, more understandable experience, Zampolin said.

Munich-based Staking Facilities has bootstrapped a $25 million investment for a venture capital arm, Louis Bauer, a business developer at Staking Facilities, told Blockworks.

The company is a validator, node operator and service provider for infrastructure and has invested in a handful of protocols like Solana, Cosmos, Polkadot and Dfinity.

In total, Staking Facilities has staked over $2.2 billion in assets and paid out $100 million in rewards, according to its website.

The Staking Facilities team: Source: Staking Facilities

The funds will be used to finance early stage teams. The company already started investing in the past few years for protocols in a lot of layer-1 blockchains, but it’s interested in getting into the DeFi and middleware section of protocols, Bauer said.

“We would like to support developer teams in earlier stages than we have before. We have been investing in a lot of protocols that are already established,” Bauer said. “One of the most interesting parts is that we will be able to support teams in the seed stage that are building an initial developer team,” he said.

DeFi portfolio management Sommelier raises $23M

In separate news, Sommelier, a decentralized portfolio manager software, has raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital.

Alameda Ventures joins as an existing investor alongside new participation from Zola Ventures, Byzantine Ventures, Tendermint Ventures, Secure Ventures, D1 Ventures, and Ferngrove Ventures, the company said. In total, Sommelier has raised about $27 million, Co-Founder Jack Zampolin told Blockworks.

The company is a complex protocol that is Ethereum-based, but will soon be managed on the Cosmos blockchain. The funding round comes at a time when the company’s network starts its mainnet, which is powered by a decentralized network of blockchain validators.

Sommelier’s software aims to stitch together multiple ecosystems so that users have an easier, more understandable experience, Zampolin said.

“I think in traditional finance, when you look at actors like prime brokerages and large investment banks, they’re doing this work, wrapping more financial products to be more passive investment vehicles,” Zampolin said. “Sommelier is an effort to do that in DeFi, but instead of providing that service to high profile individuals and very large institutions, we’re providing it to anyone with an account on one of these exchanges,” he said.

In the first six months since the launch of its “Pairings Uniswap v3 liquidity manager application” Sommelier’s product helped liquidity providers place over $10 million in liquidity on Uniswap V3, which generated over $2 million in fees for portfolio owners, it said.

In the near future, the Sommelier community will vote on its community-governed Cellars, which are programs that can fully automate liquidity management through its blockchain and can expand and improve its blockchain software as well as its ecosystem and community of LPs, it said.

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