Valantis Labs Raises $7.5 Million in Funding

Valantis Labs, the developer behind the modular decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol Valantis, has raised $7.5 million in pre-seed and seed funding rounds.

The pre-seed round, worth $3.5 million, was raised in April 2023, while the $4 million seed round closed in September 2024, according to Valantis Labs co-founder Deven Matthews. Cyber Fund and Kraken Ventures co-led the pre-seed round, while SevenX Ventures led the seed round. Other participants included Semantic Ventures, Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, Anthony Sassano, and Sandeep Nailwal.

Both rounds were structured as simple agreements for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants. The pre-seed round valued Valantis at $20 million, while the seed round doubled that valuation to $40 million.

Valantis was initially formed as an internal project at the blockchain research and engineering firm Nethermind in July 2022. After eight months, the founding team spun off to establish Valantis Labs as an independent entity, explained Matthews, a former chief strategy officer at Nethermind.

What is Valantis?

Valantis offers a modular framework to help developers build decentralized exchanges using composable modules.

“Modules are composable, more intuitive, and more powerful than hooks,” Matthews said, referring to the hooks design of the top DEX protocol Uniswap V4. Hooks allow developers to customize and extend liquidity pool behavior.

With modules, “if one developer builds a dynamic fee mechanism, and another builds a new automated market maker (AMM) curve, they can be combined easily without any smart contract changes,” Matthews stated. He also criticized Uniswap V4 for fragmenting liquidity by limiting pools to two assets, highlighting that Valantis supports any number of assets in the same pool.

Valantis Labs partnered with Arrakis Finance to launch HOT-AMM, the first modular DEX built on the Valantis protocol. Since launching in June, HOT-AMM has facilitated over $50 million in trading volume and currently maintains more than $5 million in liquidity.

In comparison, Uniswap has facilitated over $55 billion in trading volume this month alone, with Uniswap V4 expected to go live by year-end.

The Valantis Labs team consists of seven members, with plans to remain lean and add a few engineering roles, according to Matthews.

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