Folks Finance, a capital markets protocol for borrowing and lending built on the top of the Algorand blockchain, today announced the closing of its $3 million seed funding round, led by Borderless Capital with participation from a group including Jump Crypto, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Genesis Capital, and the Algorand Foundation.
Folks Finance was developed by Blockchain Italia, a blockchain software house strongly focused on Algorand. The company introduced unique features such as staking of rewards, safety margins for cryptocurrency pairs, and a liquidity provision system.
Round leader Borderless Capital is a large Algorand ecosystem investor and said it is committed to providing a higher multiple of the invested capital into the Folks Finance lending pools.
“We are proud to join Folks Finance as the lead investor in this round. Folks Finance is a key pillar of the Algorand DeFi ecosystem. The team has done an amazing job developing their protocol and building a network of highly strategic partners, setting them up to hit the ground running at launch,” said David Garcia, CEO and managing partner of Borderless Capital. “The debut of Folks Finance will enable unprecedented amounts of composability among Algorand DeFi dApps and decentralized communities, empowering projects to actively participate in more inclusive and fair capital markets on-chain.”
“As large DeFi users, we see money markets as critical infrastructure for any DeFi ecosystem,” said Anjan Vinod, VP at ParaFi Capital. “We believe Folks Finance is well-positioned to unlock liquidity for a variety of Algorand native assets and become a composable building block. From our first conversation with the Folks Finance team, we noticed how talented Benedetto and team were in designing and building DeFi applications. We are excited to support Folks’ vision in building a scalable money market.”
Folks Finance’s list of seed investors also includes leading venture capital firms such as Coinbase Ventures, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Genesis Capital, Youbi Capital, Algorand Foundation, Meld Ventures, Eterna Capital, 0x Ventures, Polymorphic Capital, Valhalla Capital, ZBS Capital, and Gains Associates. Crypto veteran angel investors supporting Folks Finance include David Garcia, CEO of Borderless Capital, and Calvin Liu, former Strategy Lead at Compound.
Several of the leading DeFi and financial protocols of the Algorand Ecosystem also joined the seed round including Algomint, Tinyman, StakerDAO, MyAlgo, Venue One, xBacked, and Prismatic.
“We are delighted and excited about the outstanding portfolio that we have been onboarding on this investment round. The team’s excellent work has resulted in an innovative design that will make Folks Finance a mainstay in capital markets protocols. We are proud to be supported by the Algorand ecosystem, making us feel part of a strong developing and expanding family,” said Folks Finance CEO Benedetto Biondi. “2022 will be the year of Algorand, and the imminent protocol launch will achieve an important milestone. We are enthusiastic about showing the outputs of a year of hard work behind the scenes.”