Zerion raises $8.2M from Mosaic Ventures to take DeFi mainstream

Evgeny Yurtaev -

Here’s what it means for our team, product and community.

5 years ago, we founded Zerion with the belief that anyone with a smartphone should have access to financial services from anywhere in the world. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $8.2M in a Series A funding led by Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Placeholder, DCG, Lightspeed, Blockchain.com Ventures and others.

Why we built Zerion

Legacy finance is inherently constrained by siloed infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. This explains why even the most innovative fintech companies have been unable to solve the geographical lottery that bars millions, if not billions of people from participating in global financial markets.

Zerion’s founding team was driven by a personal need to overcome these barriers. Back in 2016, Alexey Bashlykov (CTO), Vadim Koleoshkin (COO) and I simply didn’t have easy access to investing opportunities because of where we were born. Like countless others all over the world, crypto was our only option.

We saw early on that an internet-scale financial revolution cannot happen without internet-scale infrastructure that is permissionless, borderless, programmable and composable. DeFi is all of these things, and more.

Powering an internet-scale financial revolution

In a DeFi world, financial operations that once required expensive and slow banking middlemen can now be performed instantly and securely through smart contracts.

Without bankers as gatekeepers, DeFi users from anywhere in the world can access open lending platforms that remove bias and save time. They can earn passive income on their digital assets through lending and staking, accruing yields that are virtually unheard of in a traditional savings account. They can participate in decentralized governance, protect their wealth with stablecoins, buy crypto insurance products, and so much more.

But DeFi’s disruptive potential still remains largely untapped by mainstream audiences. This is partly because a) the world has never seen financial interoperability at this scale and b) most of DeFi remains too complex to access.

We’re here to change that. Since raising our seed round in December 2019, we’ve built an award-winning interface that unlocks the world of open finance for all investors, regardless of their crypto knowledge or experience:

  • We have over 200K monthly active users from 150 countries and have processed over $600M+ in transaction volume year-to-date.
  • We aggregate every major decentralized exchange, offering users tens of thousands of investing opportunities at the best rates, from one place, with zero commission. On average, $5M is traded on Zerion per day with a median trade size of $1,000.
  • We built the first DeFi-native app on Android and iOS. The average investor opens the Zerion app 9 times a day and we’ve seen $110M+ traded on mobile since launch.

What makes Zerion unique is that we do not have custody over user’s funds. We also don’t restrict what you can trade or when — any asset available on the Ethereum blockchain (and soon other blockchains) is tradeable on Zerion.

What’s next

In the same way that Google indexes information or Amazon provides access to consumer goods, Zerion is going to be the all-inclusive portal to the world of DeFi.

“We believe that Zerion will emerge as the leading interface for the financial products of the future — DeFi is creating an entirely new alternative financial ecosystem and Zerion enables millions of users to easily and transparently interact with it.” — Toby Coppel

Our goal moving forward is to help millions of people seamlessly participate in open finance. We’re dedicating the next stage of our company’s growth towards these goals:

  • Scaling our infrastructure. We’re gearing up to meet the demand of a million monthly active users, and beyond.
  • Multichain support. L2 chains like Polygon and other Ethereum-compatible blockchains are on our immediate roadmap.
  • A user experience fit for non-crypto natives. This includes better onboarding, fiat onramps and offramps, and relevant learning opportunities.
  • Hiring. We’re looking for world-class talent to help us achieve our goals. If you’ve read this far, that says a lot — check out our open positions.

In a space as volatile and rapidly growing as DeFi, only those who provide real value will see the upside of the market in all its forms — bear or bull. We’re in this for the long haul and token prices don’t change that.

Company changes

Alongside our new investors, Toby Coppel from Mosaic Ventures and Brad Burnham from Placeholder will be joining Zerion’s Board of Directors.

Other investors who participated in this round include DeFi Alliance Fund, Continue Capital, SevenX Ventures, G1 Ventures, Bitscale Capital, Wintermute, The LAO and a group of angel investors from the crypto community:

Closing thoughts

This milestone marks a new chapter on our path to a better financial world. We wouldn’t have made it this far without our community of Zerion users and the countless partners who helped us along the way.