Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm Seven Seven Six led a funding round for the Ethereum wallet Rainbow, raising $18 million. Following the startup’s seed round of $1.5 million, the new financing will enable Rainbow to focus on “onboarding the next 100 million users to Web3.”
$18 million raised by Ethereum-based rainbow wallet
Rainbow, a cryptocurrency wallet available for iOS and Android devices, has announced that it raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding. As noted in the announcement, the financing was led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. In recent years, Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six has been investing heavily in blockchain and Web3 startups.
Seven Seven Six and Polygon announced a $200 million fund dedicated to advancing Web3 social media in mid-December 2021. The fund will be led by Tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit with Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz.
Ohanian invested in a non-fungible token (NFT) project called Heir Inc. in the same month that Seven Seven Six and Polygon launched a Web3 social media fund.
This investment round follows the wallet project’s $1.5 million seed round, which brings Rainbow’s total funding to $19.5 million. In addition to hiring 20 new employees, Rainbow has recently launched a Web3 wallet that allows users to hold and view NFTs and Ethereum-based tokens while also enabling them to access decentralized applications (dapps).
Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Seven Seven Six venture capital firm, said in a statement to Bitcoin.com News that many crypto users, myself included, consider Rainbow to be the best-designed wallet on the market.
Rainbow’s talent, approach to design, and advocacy make them a leader in the crypto wallet space. User experience is so important – their Rainbow design choices explain why they’ve already established a loyal following and continue to educate and onboard scores of new users to Web3.”
Rainbow Wallet Team to Launch Swap Aggregator, Desktop Browser Extension in 2022, and A Slew of Web3 Wallet Competitors:
Rainbow is a good time to raise money because the Web3 wallet space is crowded, and Metamask currently leads the pack. A year from now, Metamask will collaborate with the Ethereum-based wallet Mycrypto after breaking records with 10 million active monthly users.
Metamask is Rainbow’s main competitor, but it’s also up against Trust Wallet, Argent, Coinbase Wallet, Coinomi, Guarda Wallet, and Crypto.com Wallet.
Rainbow’s plan for 2022 is to introduce new features, including an “Swap Aggregator” application, as well as the ability to leverage “Ethereum Profiles” through the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Rainbow is also working on a desktop browser extension and plans to launch a toolkit in the near future.
Christian Baroni, Rainbow’s CEO and co-founder, pointed out that the Web3 experience was still cumbersome during the announcement. Among Rainbow’s goals is to simplify where it’s possible to and educate where it’s not,” the co-founder explained.
