DeFi investing platform Zerion raises $8.2 million in Series A funding

Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Zerion, which provides an investing interface across protocols, has raised $8.2 million in a Series A funding round.

The round was led by Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Placeholder, Digital Currency Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Blockchain.com Ventures, and several others.

With fresh capital at hand, Zerion plans to grow its 200,000-strong user base to 1 million, bring new features to its platform, and expand its team, co-founder and CEO Evgeny Yurtaev told The Block.

Zerion's current headcount is 18 and its plan is to increase it to 25 by the end of the year, said Yurtaev. The firm is hiring across engineering, product management, and growth and marketing functions.

As for new features, Yurtaev said Zerion is working on improving the current user experience. This will include building a better trading experience, plus asset discovery features, and portfolio tracking. Zerion is a non-custodial platform that provides access to the DeFi market under one roof, including yield-farming tokens and liquidity pools.

Yurtaev said the U.S. is the largest market for Zerion, followed by the U.K., Germany, Australia, and Russia — although the platform has active users from over 150 countries. Zerion claims to have processed over $600 million in transaction volume year-to-date and sees $5 million traded daily, with a median trade size of $1,000.

The platform currently supports Ethereum-based assets and protocols. Yurtaev said it will enable full support for other blockchains, including Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, as well as Layer-2 solutions that have a "meaningful amount of users," in the third quarter of this year.

"We believe that Zerion will emerge as the leading interface for the financial products of the future — DeFi is creating an entirely new alternative financial ecosystem," said Toby Coppel, co-founder and partner at Mosaic Ventures.

Coppel, along with Brad Burnham of Placeholder has joined Zerion's board of directors as part of the Series A funding round. The round brings Zerion's total funding to date to $10.2 million. In December 2019, the firm raised $2 million in seed funding.