Country for PR: United States
Contributor: PR Newswire New York
Thursday, April 28 2022 - 01:07
AsiaNet
Founders Fund and Pantera Lead $20M Investment in Ondo Finance to Build a Decentralized Investment Bank
NEW YORK, April 27, 2022 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --

Ondo Finance has raised a $20M Series A to accelerate the adoption of DeFi 
among mainstream investors. This latest round of funding was led by Founders 
Fund, the venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel, and Pantera Capital. The 
funding will allow Ondo to build out its team and support new product launches 
including its multi-chain expansion. Strategic investors joining the round also 
included Coinbase Ventures, GoldenTree, Wintermute, Steel Perlot (Michelle 
Ritter / Eric Schmidt), Tiger Global, and Flow Traders.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1805719/ondo_Logo.jpg  

Ondo Finance is building a decentralized investment bank focused on connecting 
stakeholders in the emerging DeFi ecosystem, including decentralized autonomous 
organizations (DAOs), institutions, and retail investors. As its first 
offering, the company built a novel primitive for decentralized structured 
products that offer choice between downside protection and enhanced returns.


The company quickly expanded to other use cases, such as its 
Liquidity-as-a-Service (LaaS) offering, which matches DAOs with underwriters to 
provide liquidity for a DAO's native token, so that its users can easily trade 
its token in decentralized exchanges. Ondo has partnered with more than ten 
DAOs including Terra, Frax, and Fei, and has seen more than $200 million in 
liquidity deposited into its protocol. With its rapid organic community growth 
and product adoption, Ondo is ready to begin decentralizing governance with its 
upcoming launch of the ONDO token and related DAO.


"We've been delighted to see the demand for Ondo's community vaults and 
Liquidity-as-a-Service offerings, which have really been a simple MVP with no 
liquidity mining or other incentives from us", says Nathan Allman, Founder and 
CEO of Ondo Finance. "We're excited for some new product launches that will 
make it much easier for passive investors to obtain broad exposure to DeFi 
yields at a customized risk level."


Over the next few months, Ondo plans to launch several additional products with 
the aim of increasing the breadth, usefulness, and accessibility of its 
offerings. These include vaults that bundle yields from algorithmic stablecoins 
as well as vaults that aggregate yield across different blockchains.


"The growth of algorithmic stablecoins and expansion of DeFi from Ethereum to 
other blockchains has led to tremendous yield opportunities but with greater 
complexity and risks," says Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital. 
"Ondo will make it possible for investors to get passive exposure to this 
increasingly scattered but abundant yield while receiving downside protection 
or enhanced returns."


These new vaults will help build momentum for the company to grow its current 
ecosystem and user base. To increase demand, Ondo is expanding its product 
compatibility with other protocols such as Curve and Convex. To broaden capital 
supply, Ondo seeks to make its offerings more accessible through integrations 
with crypto exchanges, web2 fintechs and custodians.


"We're incredibly impressed with the early success of Ondo's structured 
products and we're excited to see the team expand its offering," says Napoleon 
Ta, Partner at Founders Fund. "Built by a world-class team at the intersection 
of crypto and institutional finance, Ondo is well-positioned to be a preeminent 
player in the continued ascent of DeFi into mainstream adoption."


About Ondo
Ondo Finance is building a decentralized investment bank. Like a traditional 
investment bank, Ondo aims to be a hub matching those who have capital with 
those who need it through the creation of customized financial products (e.g. 
equities, bonds, structured products, derivatives, etc.) that organizations can 
offer to investors to raise money. Historically, this work has often been 
highly manual, expensive, and reliant on intermediaries. Decentralized finance 
(DeFi), however, presents novel infrastructure and financial primitives to 
enable investment banking activities that are automated, composable, and 
accessible to everyone. Ondo's focus is to build software that finds attractive 
investments across the traditional and DeFi landscape, repackages these assets 
into easily understood risk/reward offerings, and then matches and offers these 
assets to both institutional and retail investors.


Media Contact:
Nathan Allman 
media@ondo.finance

SOURCE Ondo Finance