DeFi startup Quasar Finance raises $5.4 million at a $70 million valuation

Quasar Finance has raised $5.4 million in a round led by Shima Capital. 

The DeFi startup’s bridge round brings its valuation to $70 million and sees five new investors join its cap table, including Anagram, Keplr and Everstake, according to a company press release. Existing investors such as Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital and Osmosis co-founder Sunny Aggarwal also participated. 

The money will be put toward developing Quasar’s interchain decentralized asset management (DAM) protocol, which aims to make digital asset management more accessible. The startup’s total funding now amounts to $11.5 million, having announced a $6 million seed round in July. 

“Securing this funding given ongoing and difficult market conditions is a massive show of confidence and a significant reaffirmation of our partners' commitment to the common goal — making non-custodial and permissionless asset management available to all,” Valentin Pletnev, CEO and co-founder of Quasar Finance, said in the release. 

Trading across blockchains

Quasar Finance aims to enable users to create vaults and enable strategies that can deploy assets across multiple blockchains.  

The Cosmos ecosystem, which Quasar builds within, uses an inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol that enables independent blockchains to communicate with one and other as well as trade assets. The release of IBC helps make Quasar’s services possible. 

One of the startup’s first offerings will be a rebalancing index of the Cosmos ecosystem, which is capable of staking included assets, according to the release. 

"Quasar is an irreplaceable cornerstone of Cosmos and is a critical unlock for DeFi across IBC protocols,” said Alex Lin, head of research and investor at Shima Capital. “Quasar not only solves the ecosystem's fragmented capital shortcomings but also provides cutting-edge, secure vault mechanisms for a diverse user base.”