Over the last 5 months, the Nova team has been busy focusing on building Programmable Assets on Solana; as we have been doing so, we’ve been very excited to witness the rapid growth of the Solana ecosystem and we, like many others, truly believe that this is the start of an exciting stage of rapid innovation both inside and outside of the Solana blockchain.
Five months ago when Nova was near inception we partnered up with Rarestone, a venture capital firm recognised in the industry for its ability to design and execute successful fundraising and go-to-market strategies for blockchain startups. Rarestone has been incubating Nova since and, after several months of carefully planned fundraising, we’re glad to announce that we have successfully closed Nova’s initial funding round.
The Rarestone team has greatly supported the Nova team in recent months, helping raise capital for a round that was led by SVC. We selected each investor for this initial fundraising round for their value add to the project. Our initial plans to raise $1.7m had to be revisited; raising just over $3 million in total, we are humbled by the level of institutional support and awareness of our project.
“Rarestone is delighted to have been incubating Nova Finance from its conception. It has been a privilege to work alongside the founders with everything from product architecture, token engineering, system design, go-to-market and marketing. All in all, we believe that Nova’s novel and simplistic approach to portfolio management and crypto-asset investment will serve to attract a new breed of users, positively impacting this new and emerging asset class as a whole.” — Camron Miraftab, Co-Founder Raretone Capital.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has shown interest in Nova thus far and we will continue to work toward our mission that what we and our investors strongly believe in.
“Innovation, tech & entrepreneurship, these three forces solve hard & global problems, but most importantly, dramatically improve the way people live & work. The world is undergoing a transition to the Token Economies where bold ideas are funded in a market that is global, 24/7, decentralised & unstoppable. Nova is creating a new asset class that someday will be known for accelerating not just the growth & adoption of DeFi, but also many other pioneering assets.” — Tom Sichel, Co-Founder of Nova
Nova’s fundraise is made up of VC funds, companies, angel investors and community builders. Each investor in the round is known for bringing more value than just their capital. Below is a list of Nova’s investors and what they can bring to supporting Nova’s mission.
Animoca Brands invested in Nova because they believe in-game assets made programmable will be very valuable for their blockchain game users. Animoca Brands recently raised just over $138 million at a $1 billion valuation to capitalize on its mission to deliver digital property rights to gamers via non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and support top games in the space such as Axie Infinity and Star Atlas.
We are proud to have SkyVision Capital as part of the Nova Finance Family. SkyVision has played a pivotal role in Nova Finance, being an invaluable and strategic investment partner. The team has been instrumental in advising our project with their extensive depth of knowledge in the DeFi space and helping us to navigate the crypto regulatory landscape.
Rarestone invested in Nova as Rarestone Capital and incubated us with an extensive product marketing and go-to-market strategy delivered by Rarestone Labs. The firm has played a central role in leading several successful projects to market in recent months including Solana-based Port Finance and the now well-reputed Bitcoin Mining platform Compass Mining.
Solana Capital is the strategic investment arm of Solana Labs. Solana Capital’s mission is to provide capital and resources to the most promising teams building on Solana and the broader digital asset and blockchain ecosystem, typically at pre-seed and seed stages.
Founded in 2017, 3commas sees $22bn in avg monthly crypto volume in trader bots. The team behind the now well-known platform will be Product Partners and investors in Nova.
Another of our Product Partners, Solanium is excited to deploy programmable IDOs that can simplify the user experience of DeFi with a one-click purchase. By working with Nova users will be able to purchase, sit back and let the programs of the nAsset do the complex things for them with no requirements of learning about yields, collateralized loans or liquidity mining.
AscendEX (formerly BitMax) Investments is the research and investment arm of AscendEX, a global cryptocurrency financial platform. AscendEX Investments’ mission is to invest alongside innovative, early-stage blockchain projects to design, and build sustainable businesses within the digital asset ecosystem. AscendEX is excited to support Nova in their mission to democratize access to investments within the digital asset ecosystem.
Having supported many top projects in the industry in the last several years, we are excited to have Morningstar Ventures as an investor in Nova. CIO of Morningstar Ventures, Danilo, has a large experience helping products in the space grow early traction, and supercharge their userbases, so we are confident that his guidance and network will be very helpful.
Having long been committed to empowering and supporting industry startups, DFG focuses on CeFi, DeFi, NFTs, and Web3.0, allocating capital into promising early stage projects. DFG will support Nova as a gateway to the Asian crypto retail market.
A Swiss based investment firm & key supporter of Nova through their strong family office network across Europe.
Having been investing in blockchain projects and founders since early 2017, Genblock will help Nova with bringing liquidity to our ecosystem, facilitating partnerships with Solana and forging wider crypto ecosystem partnerships with their 150+ portfolio companies, as well as introductions to KOLs, market makers and exchanges.
The Spark digital team has a strong background with institutions, ex VP of Merrill Lynch & ex associates of JP Morgan to name a few of the credentials. Spark Digital will bring major support to Nova when we go on to design features that make Nova accessible for institutions.
Stacker Ventures pools community capital together for funding bold & pioneering ideas across the crypto space. Like Stacker, Nova is on a mission to accelerate the growth & adoption of pioneering assets, together we’re building tools that make venture capital hyper autonomous & decentralised.
Jsquare empowers first-class projects. In addition to investment, Jsqaure offers a suite of B2B services for promising companies, including incubation, financial advisory, fundraising, trading brokerage, and joint mining.
Mirana Ventures, an early investor and venture partner of BitDAO, saw potential in Nova’s programmable assets & portfolio tools in allowing funds and asset managers to better manage their portfolio.
A new but large crypto fund in the DeFi space, with over 70m raised, CitizenX is beginning to rapidly grow their portfolio and in the process bring many new programmable asset partnerships to Nova.
Having successfully closed this initial funding round we are set to move forward with accelerated product development, as well as planning for the public funding rounds and our rapidly approaching product launch, which will be announced formally in the coming weeks. We would like to again thank everyone for their continued interest in and support of Nova and the Nova team; we are more excited than ever to become an integral part of the rapidly expanding Solana ecosystem, with new pioneering products that will make the reach of DeFi stretch further than ever before.
Built on Solana, Nova Finance is a programmable asset protocol that automates investor strategies and allows anyone to use them via an intuitive and easily accessible portfolio platform.
By providing a range of automated tools and strategies through programmable assets, Nova Finance offers users the opportunity to mitigate downside and maximise returns, whilst simultaneously giving DeFi power users a platform with which to capitalise on their expertise.