New Richmond crypto company raises $300K

A new Richmond company working in the cryptocurrency space has raised $300,000 in equity funding from six investors, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Yield Monitor, which creates a custom-built dashboard that indexes blockchain and asset data pertaining to decentralized finance, is seeking to raise as much as $665,000, according to the March filing. Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is broadly the finance ecosystem where people trade, borrow or lend cryptocurrency.

Co-founder Nick Toce declined to discuss the funding, citing SEC regulations.

Toce is also the founder of Richmond branding and visual communications agency Helm & Hue and was one of the founders of recently sold health-tech startup Kamana. He said he developed Yield Monitor during the summer of 2021 when a popular DeFi product went down. Toce commented on the problem on a Discord group. Christophe Dupont, a developer based in Genk, Belgium, with expertise building high-speed data and information infrastructure, contacted Toce and the two embarked on what they considered a better platform.

“We both realized that we shared a common vision about what tools could be made to better support DeFi users,” said Toce. “That led to the original [minimum viable product] for Yield Monitor, which was a multichain portfolio tracking tool.”

There's a significant amount of data on the blockchain and what Yield Monitor does is aggregate and index it and put it out in a deliverable interface so developers, investors and traditional finance teams can access it. Toce said those populations are not finding solutions on the market right now that parse the data in a way that's efficient or scalable.

Toce declined to disclose Yield Monitor’s revenue, but said the three-person company is now in a post-revenue stage. The company is not currently charging registered users for basic portfolio-tracking services, but plans to offer paid tiers for advanced tools in the near future. DeFi investment funds and developers must pay a base fee for full access to the interface. Custom development and infrastructure support is offered upon request.

Yield Monitor's equity funding comes as it also recently received undisclosed grants from The Algorand Foundation and The Fantom Foundation, two DeFi ecosystems the company focuses on.

“One of the biggest challenges that we find as founders is making sure we are strategic with our time and our limited resources, and making sure we build out really useful data-driven tools,” said Toce.