DeFi investment tool Zerion raises $8.2 million in Series A

DeFi investment tool Zerion raises $8.2 million in Series A

By Alice Leetham - min read
Image of DeFi on a smartphone

Mosaic Ventures and DCG were among the backers of Zerion, which has gained over 200,000 monthly active users

Decentralised finance (DeFi) investment platform Zerion announced yesterday that it had concluded a Series A funding round in which it raised $8.2 million from investors including Blockchain.com Ventures, DCG, Lightspeed and Placeholder. The round was led by Mosaic Ventures.

Founded in 2016 by Evgeny Yurtaev, Alexey Bashlykov and Vadim Koleoshkin, Zerion aims to solve the “geographical lottery” of legacy finance by giving everyone access to investing opportunities regardless of where they live in the world.

As Yurtaev explained: “We saw early on that an internet-scale financial revolution cannot happen without internet-scale infrastructure that is permissionless, borderless, programmable and composable. DeFi is all of these things, and more.”

The Zerion platform is available for web, iOS and Android and supports more than 60 DeFi protocols. Users can explore the DeFi market, trade assets at the best prices aggregated from other exchanges, and easily track and manage their portfolio. Zerion users also have full custody over their assets at all times.

The platform now has more than 200,000 monthly active users across 150 countries. Zerion sees an average trade volume of $5 million per day and has processed over $750 million worth of transactions, including at least $110 million traded on mobile.

Toby Coppel of Mosaic Ventures commented, “We believe that Zerion will emerge as the leading interface for the financial products of the future — DeFi is creating an entirely new alternative financial ecosystem and Zerion enables millions of users to easily and transparently interact with it.”

The Series A was also backed by angel investors including Pantera Capital’s Joey Krug, Aave’s Stani Kulechov, Balancer’s Fernando Martinelli and Curve’s Julien Bouteloup. As well as new funding, Zerion’s Board of Directors is growing, with the addition of Placeholder’s Brad Burnham and Mosaic Ventures’ Toby Coppel.

Zerion aims to be the all-inclusive portal to the DeFi sector and is now focusing on company growth in order to achieve this goal. Next steps on the project’s roadmap include adding support for Layer 2 chains such as Polygon, scaling the platform’s infrastructure to meet the demand of over 1 million monthly active users, and improving the user experience for those who are new to crypto through learning opportunities, better onboarding, and fiat onramps and offramps. The company is also looking to expand its team by hiring world-class talent.