Zaki Manian's DeFi project Sommelier raises $23 million in Series A funding

Sommelier Finance, a crypto project that helps automate DeFi trading, has raised $23 million in a Series A funding round.

The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from existing investor Alameda Ventures and new investors Zola Ventures, Byzantine Ventures, Tendermint Ventures, Secure Ventures, D1 Ventures, and Ferngrove Ventures.

Sommelier was founded in 2020 by Zaki Manian, former lead developer of the Cosmos protocol and Tendermint. Sommelier is a blockchain protocol that helps automate liquidity providers' (LPs') capital allocation to maximize yields.

With fresh funds at hand, Sommelier plans to upgrade its protocol and launch "Cellars" to help manage liquidity across DeFi protocols. Sommelier Cellars are community-elected strategies that the Sommelier network of validators execute to manage the movement of capital across blockchains.

Sommelier currently supports Uniswap v3 liquidity pools. The project says it has helped liquidity providers place over $10 million in liquidity on Uniswap V3, which generated over $2 million in fees for portfolio owners in the first six months since the launch of its tool.

Sommelier says it plans to support more liquidity pools across Ethereum-compatible blockchains and Layer 2 networks.

The Series A funding round brings Sommelier's total funding to date to at least $26.5 million. In March, the project raised $3.5 million in seed funding.

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Yogita Khatri is a senior reporter at The Block and the author of The Funding newsletter. As our longest-serving editorial member, Yogita has been instrumental in breaking numerous stories, exclusives and scoops. With over 3,000 articles to her name, Yogita is The Block's most-published and most-read author of all time. Before joining The Block, Yogita wrote for CoinDesk and The Economic Times. You can reach her at [email protected] or follow her latest updates on X at @Yogita_Khatri5.

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