Today we, at Squads Labs, are excited to announce the successful completion of our $10 million Series A funding round led by Electric Capital with participation from RockawayX, Coinbase Ventures, L1D, Placeholder and Mert Mumtaz. This milestone will support our mission to grow the onchain economy by developing smart account technology and products that make it easy for businesses, teams, and individuals to securely transact, manage, and own digital assets.
Where we are and how we got here
In 2021, we formed the company to build tools that allow onchain organizations to manage assets and collectively make decisions. At the time, we thought that all onchain organizations could and should be DAOs - decentralized communities leveraging onchain infrastructure to come together and govern digital assets and protocols. However, we quickly discovered that if you make transactions cheaper and faster - more traditional (centralized) organizations start to explore how to use blockchains for their operations as well.
That insight made it clear to us that over time, as blockchains scale, more workflows and operations for enterprises will move onchain. To accommodate this transition we created Squads Protocol - the smart account standard for Solana and SVM that secures over $10 billion in value. On top of Squads Protocol, we built the Squads App, an enterprise platform that enables businesses to run their operations onchain and is trusted by 250+ teams. With Squads, businesses can deploy a smart account, configure it to satisfy their security and organizational requirements, and then use it to manage a wide range of onchain assets such as their treasury, program upgrade authorities, admin keys, tokens and validators. Our goal is to bring a traditional SaaS-like product experience to onchain asset management in a way that feels familiar and intuitive to both traditional and crypto-native businesses.
As Squads App adoption grew, we noticed that many security-sensitive individuals looking for hot wallet alternatives were creating smart accounts to store their personal assets. To make sure that their experience of using smart accounts was seamless and intuitive, we developed Fuse - a smart wallet that abstracts away seed phrases, and offers wallet recovery and 2FA capabilities. Fuse unlocks enterprise-level security for personal custody and makes the choice of storing digital wealth onchain an easy one. Today, we are opening Fuse for public TestFlight on iOS. We look forward to more Solana users accessing the same smart account technology used by Solana’s leading protocols, teams and investors to secure their assets.
Looking ahead
As the onchain economy grows, so does the adoption of smart accounts and smart wallets across blockchains.
These trends correlate because smart accounts unlock a more intuitive, secure and programmable way for users to interact with blockchain ecosystems. We are committed to growing the onchain economy by contributing to the advancement of smart account technology and building meticulously designed products that make it easy and intuitive for enterprises and individuals to transact, manage and own digital assets.
This new round of funding will allow us to:
continue contributing to Squads Protocol, making sure that it continues to be the most secure and robust smart account standard for the ecosystem
take Squads App to the next level by further simplifying how teams run their onchain workflows at every stage of their lifecycle and by enabling enterprises to seamlessly migrate even more of their operations onchain
bring Fuse to market and make it the best place for securing and compounding personal digital wealth, and
create the ultimate developer toolkit for SVM smart accounts.
We are excited to work with our new partners (Electric Capital, RockawayX and Coinbase Ventures) and grateful for our backers from previous rounds for continuing to support us on this journey (Placeholder, L1 Digital and Mert).
How to get involved
If:
you want greater security and programmability for storing personal assets, download Fuse for iOS (https://testflight.apple.com/join/sQkNVD2s) and join the Telegram group (https://t.me/+QKzWuyCra345MTBk) to get your code
you are a team building on Solana and need a place to secure and manage your developer and treasury assets, create your account on https://app.squads.so and reach out to garrett@sqds.io to get onboarded
you feel passionate about our mission and would like to join us, send an email to stepan@sqds.io
Let’s grow the onchain economy together.
