Fintech venture capital fund Augmentum enters DeFi and will co-invest in new projects with top crypto fund ParaFi
On January 11, Augmentum Fintech, a British financial technology venture capital fund, announced that it has reached a cooperation with ParaFi Capital, a top crypto fund, and the two parties will jointly invest in a DeFi agreement.
Augmentum has allocated a fund to ParaFi, the specific amount of which was not disclosed. Tim Levene, the company’s chief executive officer, said the scale of funding is in the millions. If ParaFi can fulfill its promise, the company has the ability to expand its position in the future.
According to Augmentum, the two companies will jointly invest in DeFi development teams in Europe and the United States “before the project is publicly released.” “ParaFi will invest in the seed stage, before the tokens are publicly sold… We believe that if we can enter this stage, there will be a huge opportunity.”
In addition to co-investing in emerging DeFi projects, Augmentum will also support ParaFi invested projects, including Uniswap, MakerDAO and Compound.
Talking about why it entered the DeFi investment market, Augmentum pointed out, “In recent years, DeFi has developed strongly, attracting 21 billion US dollars in capital inflow last year alone. Our partnership with ParaFi highlights our belief that software can cause damage. Sex will further penetrate into the financial service system, and software may play a role equivalent to a trusted intermediary in financial transactions.”
Augmentum said that in the DeFi ecosystem, the project development team is using open source software to rebuild the basic layers of the financial system. Traditional finance relies on centralized institutions to complete transactions, while decentralized finance can complete transactions only through programmable “smart contracts”.
According to public information, Augmentum is a financial technology venture capital fund backed by the Rothschild family (the top ten families in the world). It was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018. Its current asset management scale is 193 million pounds, and it has investment status. Verification company OnFido, digital bank Tide/Monese, and P2P lending company Zopa.
Augmentum partner ParaFi Capital is a venture capital firm focusing on blockchain and DeFi. Its founder, Benjamin Forman, is from private equity giant KKR. So far, the company has invested in many well-known DeFi projects such as Aave, Kyber Network, Synthetix, MakerDAO, Compound, Teller, Uniswap, Nexus Mutual, Keep Network, 1inch Exchange and BarnBridge.
