Web 3 funding: September 2020 in numbers, Europe is dominating. again.
September is proving once again the industry is here to stay. Despite slight slowdown in the markets, fundraising is booming. Continuing the tradition I am looking into the fundraising data for the second quarter of the year to get a comprehensive view of the state of Web 3. I am doing this every month to see how the true effect of COVID-19 unravels in the Web 3 world in near real time across 5 charts. See August 2020 numbers here.
September is solidifying fundamentals with 97 deals and $227 million raised. This is 4x more deals than August.
Source: Pitchbook, Crunchbase and The Block
The median raise this month was $1.4 million across 26 different verticals. The majority of the deals were equity-based transactions. The markets are taking a break from an August filled with sales and farming. We are solidifying the fundamentals as uncertainty looms in the macro picture.
52% of the deals were in DeFi & Fintech.
Source: Pitchbook, Crunchbase and The Block
The DeFi & Fintech companies that raised in September are spread across 16 niches. This time around Exchanges, Infrastructure and Asset Management topped the chart with almost half of all DeFi deals. Payments, liquidity and accounting and tax are still going strong. Very positive to see more and more infrastructure being built around the challenges experienced in the sharp uptick of usage and contracts deployed in August. DeFi is all about experimentation and iteration.
If you are a founder looking at the future of finance, drop me a message!
DeFi & Fintech also attracted 2/3rd of the funding with $157 million committed!
Equity investors are catching up on deal making this month with DeFi projects. The fundamentals of the industry are being developed alongside speculation and experimentation. Unlike Fintechs, DeFi adopted a “build now, ask for forgiveness later” mentality which is definitely shortening innovation cycles. The downside is regulators being on their toes again, but the market is not too bothered.
Media, NFT, Ledger, Infrastructure are amongst the other 26 verticals with 4-5 deals each.
Source: Pitchbook, Crunchbase and The Block
In the past few months we had a spike in infrastructure with Near announcing a raise, DIA raising via bonding curve sale and Avalanche going public with their token. This month we saw 5 ledger deals despite having a broad choice of layer 1 ledgers, teams are launching continuously. Hopefully they’ll be putting these raises to work with developer adoption.
This month the focus in the media was on NFTs but the influx of new teams are still to show traction and raise. Fundraising is a lagging indicator. I am very bullish on the short term outlook for the Metaverse. From virtual lands, avatars, art to digital fashion and experiences, we are exploring a variety of use cases.
If you are a founder building in the Metaverse, drop me a message!
The most common round for September was public token sales seed.
Source: Pitchbook, Crunchbase and The Block
How the tables have turned. The past 2 months were quite crazy and the markets took a bit of a break. This month the most popular raises are equity-based seeds. In fact we only saw one private sale (publicly announced). The month was also quite positive for M&A activity and equity crowdfunding. Congrats team Pynk!
Source: Pitchbook, Crunchbase and The Block
Europe is hot and leading the US by 4 deals with 40 in total and about $60m more committed putting Europe at $123m.
Thank you Bitpanda and congrats on the $52m!
Source: Pitchbook, Crunchbase and The Block
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First published: Outlier Ventures Blog