According to Odaily, the first quarter of 2024 saw a significant increase in cryptocurrency financing, with startups raising $2.4 billion in 518 transactions. This represents a 40.3% increase in investment capital and a 44.7% increase in transaction volume compared to the previous quarter.
Infrastructure startups led the financing this quarter, with the largest rounds of financing raised by Ethereum re-pledge platform EigenLayer ($100 million in Series B financing) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) development platform Zama ($73 million in Series A financing). The report also highlighted that the largest transaction of the quarter came from Together AI, a developer of an open-source, decentralized cloud platform for large-scale basic models. The company raised $106 million in early financing, led by Salesforce Ventures, with a pre-investment valuation of $1.1 billion.
Notably, the median pre-investment valuations for pre-seed/seed stage, early stage, and late stage were $21.8 million, $72 million, and $51.1 million respectively, representing year-on-year growth of 85.5%, 148.3%, and 7.6%. The transaction sizes also reflected the rise in valuations, with the median financing for pre-seed/seed stage, early stage, and late stage being $2.7 million, $5 million, and $5.8 million respectively. This represents a growth of 24.9% and 25.0%, and a decrease of 9.7% compared to the full year of 2023.