Kelp DAO, one of the largest liquid recovery protocols, has raised $9 million in a private sale round to expand its infrastructure as the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape gets bigger by the day.
The new capital injection comes amid growing interest in liquid recovery, with total value locked in major platforms exceeding $4 billion.
The latest round was led by SCB Limited, a proprietary trading company based in the Bahamas, and Laser Digital, the digital assets arm of Nomura Global, which collectively invested $3.5 million.
Other participants in the round included Bankless Ventures, Hypersphere, Draper Dragon, DACM, Cypher Capital, ArkStream, Cluster Capital, GSR, Longhash, Side Door Ventures, NOIA Capital, HTX Ventures, Avid3, ViaBTC Capital, DWF Ventures, Coinseeker and many more . others.
Dheeraj Borra, Co-Founder of Kelp DAO, comments: “This fundraising fuels our expansion in the market and sharpens our focus on creating customer-centric solutions. “It’s really exciting that our investors share that vision.”
The two founders of Kelp DAO, Amitej Gajjala and Dheeraj Borra, expressed their gratitude for the support of investors, which will propel Kelp DAO to reach new heights in recovery solutions.
Kelp DAO plans to use the funds to upgrade the capabilities of its platform, expand to other ecosystems such as y, and take up even more solutions. This is in addition to the platform already having more than $850 million in total value locked (TVL) and more than 40,000 active resetters.
The funding round includes support from prominent angel investors in the crypto community, such as Scott, co-founder of Gitcoin; Álex, executive director of Nansen; Sam K, co-founder of Frax; Marc Zeller, of the Aave Chan Initiative; Saurabh Sharma of Jump Crypto; Amrit, COO of Altlayer; Anthony, co-founder of Swissborg; and Mr. Block's Winslow Strong.
Laser Digital CEO Jez Mohideen stated: “We are very excited to support Kelp DAO and the passionate team on their journey towards building innovative recovery infrastructure solutions.”
Jack Platts, co-founder of Hypersphere Ventures, added: “We are excited at the prospect of resuming the initiative by allowing more experimentation and use cases for developers. Kelp's proven equipment and focus on user experience are playing a key role in the restoration's initial success. We look forward to the team executing on their vision of improving returns and optionality for ETH stakers.”
The idea behind the liquid buyback offered by Kelp and others is to allow ETH holders, whether they hold native ETH or LST tokens, to invest and buyback without losing access to the underlying capital. That's why it's called “liquid” recovery.
Kelp DAO's liquid staked token (LRT) was the first to hit the mainnet and currently offers service for native ETH and LST on the Ethereum mainnet and eight L2 networks.
