Brine Fi, a decentralized exchange, has made headlines by securing $16.5 million (around Rs 137 crore) in a Series A funding round led by US-based investment firm Pantera Capital.

The round, which takes the company’s valuation to $100 million. also saw participation from Elevation Capital, Starkware Ltd, Spartan Group, Goodwater Capital, Upsparks Capital, Protofund Ventures, and a clutch of angel investors. 

Brine Fi | Decentralized Order-book Exchange

Founded by university friends Shaaran Lakshminarayanan (CEO), Bhavesh Praveen (CTO), and Ritumbhara Bhatnagar (CDO), Brine Fi is a UAE and Bengaluru-based crypto trading execution platform for institutions and high-frequency traders. 

It is an order book spot decentralized exchange (DEX) that uses zkP (zero-knowledge proofs) technology powered by StarkWare, enabling privacy on trading positions so that traders can get their high-volume orders executed with ease. 

Speaking about the development, Shaaran Lakshminarayanan, Co-founder of Brine Fi, highlighted the need to diversify user assets constantly in multiple exchanges and venues to reduce asset loss risk due to troubled exchanges/parties.

He said, 

“….with Brine Fi, we make it easy for institutions, centralised exchanges, HFT traders, and retail users to reduce their counterparty risk, and at the same time, get the best price for their orders in the industry.”

Brine Fi claims to enable users to trade gasless and pay a trading fee as small as 0.05%. The decentralized exchange aims to address the shortcomings faced by crypto traders during trading and also solves issues prevailing in DEXs like frontrunning.

Statement from the Investors

Commenting on the development, Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital, said,

“Brine tackles some of the most important challenges holding back institutional and mainstream user adoption in DeFi. There’s an urgent demand for a self-custodial execution layer that is faster, more reliable, user-friendly, and cost-effective.” 

Vaas Bhaskar, Principal at Elevation Capital, highlighted his excitement to continue to invest in Brine, in their mission of abstracting complexities of blockchain technology and making it more accessible to end users and institutions.

In July 2023, Shardeum, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible sharded blockchain led by WazirX’s Nishchal Shetty, raised $5.4 million in a strategic round to bolster the ecosystem’s growth as the startup prepares for the upcoming mainnet launch scheduled later this year. Earlier in April, a blockchain-enabled trade finance platform on Polygon Chain, Polytrade, raised $3.8 million in a seed funding round.

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