Peter Thiel's Founders Fund co-leads $8 million Series A for Base-based derivatives exchange Avantis

Avantis, a Base-based decentralized exchange for leverage trading, has raised $8 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Pantera Capital.

Other investors in the round include Symbolic Capital, SALT Fund and Flowdesk, Avantis said Tuesday. While the round closed in mid-2024, Avantis chose to announce it now to align with the protocol's growth, Harsehaj Singh, CEO of Lumena Labs, the core contributor to Avantis, told The Block. Over the past year, the platform has expanded its offering and now ranks as the largest derivatives protocol on Base, Singh said.

The Series A was structured as equity with token warrants, Singh said, declining to disclose the post-money valuation. It brings Avantis' total funding to $12 million, including a $4 million seed round closed in September 2023.

Launched last year, Avantis enables users to trade and market-make crypto and real-world assets, including forex and commodities. The platform says it has facilitated more than $7.5 billion in cumulative volume and serves over 60,000 users.

It now plans to add support for equities, sports and prediction markets. "We're setting clear goals and KPIs (key performance indicators), to truly bring every global asset, market and event onchain," Singh said. "This greatly expands our TAM [total addressable market] from perpetuals for crypto + macro assets, to perpetuals for every global market, including sports, prediction markets and more."

To power that vision, Avantis is planning a full technical overhaul — upgrading its automated market maker (AMM) to handle any type of price feed, from gold and crude oil to sports odds. It also plans to launch a custom Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain to enable fast, gasless trading.

The overhaul will culminate in the launch of Avantis v2 in the coming months. Singh said it will bring 10x capital efficiency for the AMM, advanced trading features, and cross-margining for real-world asset markets.

"Avantis is pioneering a new class of DeFi infrastructure by bringing global macro markets natively onchain," Paul Veradittakit, general partner at Pantera Capital, said in a statement. "As real-world asset adoption matures, companies like Avantis will be the universal leverage layer for everything from interest rate volatility to sports."

Avantis currently has a 12-person team and Singh said the project plans to remain lean, with selective hiring of AI-focused engineers to support new trading strategies.

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