Azuro Closes $4M Strategic Investment Round
We have closed yet another successful funding round, raising a further $4 million, bringing the total raised to $7.5 million!
We are now proud to announce we have backing from some of the most experienced names in web3 including early seed round investors AllianceDAO, Arrington Capital, Ethereal Ventures, Delphi Digital, new joiners Hypersphere, Quiet Capital, Formless Capital, and great crypto teams who participated in both rounds like Gnosis & Merit Circle.
The recent round of $4m funding came from a variety of areas in web3 including GameFi/Metaverse (Merit Circle, OPGames, and PathDAO) web3 infrastructure/products Gnosis & Mask Network, plus venture capitalists and investors Hypersphere, SevenX, Red Beard Ventures, NxGen, Formless Capital and Quiet Capital, and angels like Victor Ji, co-founder of Manta Network.
This provided the validation we needed for our previous efforts and was key to us recently launching Azuro’s mainnet successfully on Gnosis Chain.
Azuro contributor Paruyr Shahbazyan commented:
“Delivering on our 2-pronged mission to disrupt traditional online betting with a fairer, more transparent, and more fun decentralized alternative, and to build a betting overlay for the Metaverse is impossible without strong support. We look forward to working together with our investors and partners as we progress further on our path!”
Who Did We Raise Our Latest Round From & Why?
Hypersphere — an investment group leveraging on-chain treasuries, decentralized organizations, and governance to increase the utility of the blockchain networks in which they invest. Hypersphere dives deep into protocols and currencies and participates heavily in community building and ecosystem growth.
Merit Circle — Seed and strategic round investors who were the first to spot the opportunity to bring decentralized betting to GameFi and are currently working on embedding Azuro into the MC meta-game dashboard. We aim to provide Merit Circle with a plug-and-play betting infrastructure for PvP head-to-head matches and PvP tournaments for money, that they could tailor onto and layer over any game.
OPGames and PathDAO — Both focussed on the growth of the metaverse, and are great for helping us fine-tune our thesis around the intersection of betting and GameFi.
Mask Network — Creators of an open-source browser extension that creates a bridge between web2 and web3 which we hope to utilize in the future to embed trustless decentralized betting into web2 sites.
Red Beard Ventures — Managing Partner Drew Austin, Co-Founder of Knights of Degen NFT showed an interest in Azuro which led to Red Beard Ventures becoming early investors in Azuro, and to the partnership between the Knights of Degen (an avid community of sport and betting enthusiasts native to web3) and Azuro.
SevenX — Expert VCs who have invested in projects covering many areas of web3 that bring unique Asian market expertise to Azuro.
NxGen & Formless Capital — Crypto native investors enhancing our capability and widening our reach within crypto.
Quiet Capital — Early investors for tech businesses with big names in their portfolio including Airbnb and Brave.
Additional Information
Azuro protocol takes aim at traditional betting which is fraught with issues of lack of trust and transparency between betting operators and players.
However, with the right approach blockchain & smart-contract tech is now capable of supporting decentralized betting at scale, and this leads to delivering meaningful improvements for players and other participants in the new decentralized betting ecosystem.
Azuro’s fresh take on prediction markets includes the introduction of a new approach (inspired by how pooled liquidity helped scale DEXs, like Uniswap, and lending protocols, such as Aave) with a brand new liquidity pool design called the Liquidity Tree.
Jack Platts, from Hypersphere who participated in the round commented:
“Betting markets are one of the few applications where crypto was always supposed to shine. So far though, none have been able to crack the nut of bootstrapping liquidity for popular betting disciplines. We believe Azuro’s team and their Liquidity Tree technology can finally make the promise come true.”
Azuro has recently launched their mainnet on Gnosis Chain, and the first independent frontend part of the Azuro ecosystem is live: bookmaker.XYZ.
Azuro allows “frontends” like bookmaker.XYZ to deliver a trustless, non-custodial betting experience to players. With traditional online betting sites, players have to deposit money to place bets, whereas, with apps, websites, or widgets connected to Azuro — players never have to make deposits. When a bet is placed, the money or stake is locked into the Azuro smart contracts which have pre-determined outcomes. Once the game/event finishes — the contract allows players to claim their winnings (if they win).
About Azuro
Azuro is the base layer for decentralized betting. The layer where betting markets are priced, created, and made liquid. This is achieved through mixing 3 of crypto’s main primitives: Prediction Markets, NFTs, and DAO governance, plus a new Liquidity Pool design, called the Liquidity Tree.
The result is a slick betting feed with thousands of liquid markets, a rich feature set, and a clean UX.
Apps built on top of Azuro can now provide a viable decentralized alternative to traditional online bookmakers (a.k.a. sportsbooks). As a result, Azuro envisions a rich, fun betting environment with decreased cost of service to players, full transparency, community-run, and a commitment to responsibility.
Follow the links below to join Azuro’s communities and stay up to date with our progress.
