The foundation of the COTI ecosystem fund, COTI Ventures, has been officially announced.
The fund aims to invest in and capitalize on the “upside opportunity” in the COTI ecosystem, by securing an initial budget of $10M, which will be used “to invest in equity, tokens and other forms of capital in early stage startups developing solutions related to COTI’s ecosystem.”
The team is focusing on investing in “strong and experienced founding teams with a robust business plan that rely on a great product market fit and a quick time to market, thus creating strategic partnerships and encouraging new use cases for our tokens, products or infrastructure.”
The fund will be led by COTI’s CFO, Yair Lavi, and a team of skilled analysts and researchers, who will “identify interesting opportunities for collaborations and analyze how they can contribute to the COTI business model.”
Apart from placing the initial investment, the team will “advise the projects and use its expertise, connections and resources to assist the founding teams in achieving their business objectives.”
Recently, the fund has made its first investment in WingRiders, a new and promising Cardano DEX, by joining other participants in the funding round “such as cFund, Longhash and others.”
Upon meeting the team and performing a thorough analysis of the tech and the business plan, the team is impressed by the founders and convinced “in their ability to become a leading platform in the Cardano ecosystem.”
The second investment was “at AdaSwap, which raised a $2.6M round that included leading investors, such as Hollywood star, Gal Gadot.”
Both investments include “a partnership with the projects, as well as Djed integration into their platforms, which will enable increased liquidity and Djed’s participation in trading assets through liquidity pools, Djed pairs and more.”
Yair Lavi, COTI’s CFO said:
“I look forward to my new adventure as head of COTI Ventures. During my 4 years at COTI I’ve seen our ecosystem as well as our variety of products and services grow tremendously, and the next evolution is to encourage new teams to work together with COTI by assisting them in their initial fund raising.”
He added:
“In the past few months we’ve seen numerous funds and multinational organizations like a16z, Sequoia, Bessemer and Bain setting up dedicated web3 and blockchain funds, as they believe blockchain technology and the new web3 economy will take a major place in our life in the near future. We’re excited to join them and others in partnering with the most talented founders forging this new future.”
The team also said that they “welcome builders and early stage projects interested in collaborating with the COTI ecosystem to apply for an investment from COTI Ventures” (by sending a message to: contact@coti.vc).
As mentioned in the update, COTI is “a fully encompassing ‘Finance on the blockchain’ ecosystem, specifically designed to meet the challenges of both centralized finance (fees, latency, global inclusion and risk) and Decentralized Finance DeFi (fees, clogging and complexity) by introducing a new type of DAG based base protocol and infrastructure that is scalable, fast, private, inclusive, low cost and is optimized for finance.”