Web3 startup aPriori has raised $20 million in a strategic funding round, bringing its total capital to $30 million. The round was led by a consortium of prominent investors including Pantera Capital, HashKey Capital, Primitive Ventures, IMC Trading, Gate Labs, GEM, Ambush Capital, and Big Brain Collective.
Founded in 2023 by former quant traders and engineers from Coinbase, Jump Trading, and Citadel Securities, the San Francisco-based company is developing a blockchain-native order flow coordination layer. This infrastructure aims to bring high-frequency trading (HFT) onchain, addressing key challenges in decentralized finance (DeFi) such as wide spreads, miner extractable value (MEV) leakage, and toxic order flow.
The funding will accelerate the development of aPriori's core products, including Swapr—an AI-driven DEX aggregator that classifies trade intent and impact in real-time—and an MEV-powered liquid staking protocol designed to redistribute extracted value to stakers and validators. The platform leverages artificial intelligence for real-time trade classification and routing, protecting liquidity providers from predatory arbitrage while offering tighter spreads to benign traders.
aPriori has chosen the Monad blockchain as its primary launchpad due to its high-performance Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment, which offers low latency and high throughput necessary for institutional-grade trading logic. This aligns with growing institutional interest in DeFi yield opportunities, exemplified by JPMorgan Asset Management's recent $500 million commitment to AI-driven hedge fund Numerai.
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