Crypto VC Paradigm Leads $11.6M Round for Kuru Labs’ DeFi Liquidity Engine

Kuru Labs, a decentralized finance (DeFi) startup built on the Monad blockchain, has closed an $11.6 million Series A funding round led by crypto-focused investment firm Paradigm.

The raise will help create a central-limit orderbook (CLOB) combined with automated market-making capabilities for Monad, a super-fast version of Ethereum, which was also backed by Paradigm in a $225 million raise last year.

The CLOBs are trading systems that match traders' buy and sell orders based on time and price priority. The orders are sent at a pre-defined price and would only get executed if the price limit is matched.

Also participating in the kuru Labs raise was a slew of angel investors, including Viktor Bunin (Credibly Neutral), Zagabond, Tristan Yver, Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan, 3nes, Will Price, Shreyas Hariharan, Auri, and Joe Takayama, among others.

“Kuru Labs is dedicated to building the premier liquidity hub for Monad, bringing a performant central-limit orderbook to the EVM for the first time along with integrated discovery and trading terminal, user liquidity provision, and token launchpad,” the company said in a blog post on Monday.

“Powered by Monad’s globally decentralized network, Kuru will unify liquidity across the ecosystem with our hybrid integrated CLOB-AMM model that preserves composability and democratizes access to liquidity provisioning,” it said.