MNX, a decentralized futures exchange tailored for the artificial intelligence economy and built on the Ethereum Layer 2 network MegaETH, has secured $6.4 million in a pre-seed funding round at a $40 million valuation. The round was led by Village Global, with participation from Cambrian, North Island Ventures, Finality Capital, Relay Digital, and angel investors including Matt Liston (co-founder of Augur and Gnosis), Scott Moore (Gitcoin), Dwarkesh Patel, and Byrne Hobart.
The funding was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, and no investors received board seats or advisory roles. MNX was founded in fall 2024 by Stephen Grugett and Ian Philips, co-founders of the prediction market platform Manifold Markets, to create a trading venue for AI-linked assets that are hard to access on traditional markets.
MNX’s product lineup includes valuation futures (using dated contracts rather than perpetuals for illiquid private company valuations), equity perpetuals focused on AI-related companies like Z.ai and Sivers, compute perpetuals based on SemiAnalysis indices, and prediction markets centered on AI-specific topics. The exchange uses 200-millisecond batch auctions enabled by MegaETH’s sub-millisecond block times to reduce latency races and MEV, ensuring all trades in the same auction receive the same price.
The platform is in private beta with institutional partners on the MegaETH testnet and aims for a mainnet launch before the end of summer. To bootstrap liquidity, MNX plans to deploy a single Hyperliquidity Provider (HLP)-style vault managed by the team, modeled after Hyperliquid and Lighter. The fresh capital will also be used for hiring three to six full-time employees. The team has no plans to expand beyond MegaETH, viewing multi‑chain support as non‑essential.
