Kelp DAO, a liquid restaking platform built on Ethereum's EigenLayer, has successfully raised $9 million in a private token sale round, the company announced.
Kelp DAO, a liquid restaking platform built on Ethereum's EigenLayer, has successfully raised $9 million in a private token sale round, the company announced. The funding round was led by SCB Limited, a proprietary trading firm based in the Bahamas, and Laser Digital, the crypto unit of Nomura Global, with a combined investment of $3.5 million.
Notable participants in the round included Bankless Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, Draper Dragon, DACM, Cypher Capital, GSR, HTX Ventures, and DWF Ventures. The round also saw participation from angel investors such as Scott Moore of Gitcoin, Sam Kazemian of Frax Finance, Marc Zeller of Aave Chan Initiative, Saurabh Sharma of Jump Crypto, and Amrit Kumar of AltLayer.
According to Amitej Gajjala, co-founder of Kelp, the private token sale round began in February and concluded in March. At the time of the sale, the fully diluted valuation of the KELP token was set at $90 million, with Kelp's total value locked (TVL) standing at around $300 million. Since then, Kelp's TVL has grown to approximately $961 million. While Gajjala mentioned that the fully diluted valuation could increase if a new funding round were to take place, he clarified that there are no immediate plans for such a round.
Kelp intends to launch its governance token, KELP, in the near future. The team is currently undergoing legal and exchange due diligence processes. It's important to note that the KELP token is unrelated to Kelp's KEP token, which represents EigenLayer points. Kelp recently suspended KEP claims due to the non-fungible nature of EigenLayer's snapshot logic. Users who have already claimed KEP will receive EigenLayer tokens instead.