Sommelier Secures $23 mln in Series A Funding To Automate DeFi Investing

Sommelier, a blockchains startup based in San Francisco, has secured $23 million in Series A funding to help DeFi investors identify investment opportunities and reallocate assets.

The funding round was led by Polychain Capital and brings the total capital raised by the startup to $27.5 million. Firms Alameda Ventures, Zola Ventures, Byzantine Ventures, Tendermint Ventures, Secure Ventures, D1 Ventures, and Ferngrove Ventures also participated in the round. Olaf Carlson-Wee, Founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, referred to the reasons for the firm’s participation by stating:

“Sommelier is revolutionizing traditional portfolio management by empowering Liquidity Providers with decentralized execution automation. Zaki and Sommelier’s world-class team is bringing the right product to market at exactly the right time as more and more individuals and institutions make DeFi part of their investing strategies and we are proud to play a role in their growth through this important funding round.”

Founded in 2020, Sommelier has been helping thousands of cryptocurrency investors to navigate the increasingly complex DeFi ecosystem. It does this by automating operations such as portfolio rebalancing after having identified opportunities to increase the yield generated by its user’s portfolio. Zaki Manian, Co-Founder of Sommelier, said in this regard:

“Sommelier is bringing the promise of the Cosmos blockchain and Tendermint consensus to power a new approach to financial engineering and portfolio management. Over the past decade, we’ve seen incredible decentralized foundations built as a number of blockchain platforms have emerged with numerous use cases, and we’re excited to use this funding to tap the potential of blockchains to create automated portfolio management tools that surpass even what’s possible in traditional, centralized finance.”

With the DeFi ecosystem continuing to grow by the day as millions of investors continue to join, navigating the hundreds of protocols and platforms has become a major challenge for investors. This, combined with the upcoming release of Ethereum 2.0, has resulted in an increasing demand for platforms like the one developed by Sommelier to take advantage of the financial opportunities that the space represents.