A web3 company founded by a team of former nCino (Nasdaq: NCNO) technologists has raised $3.8 million.
Nathan Snell, co-founder and CEO of Wilmington-based Raleon, said the six-person team will be hiring as it builds out its platform.
The success of the raise, led by Blockchange with participation from Play Ventures, Alliance DAO and Portal Ventures, came down to “great investors and a good community,” Snell said.
Snell and his team all come from nCino, a fintech spin-off of Wilmington-based Live Oak Bank (Nasdaq: LOB). Snell, a co-founder of nCino, said he’s an entrepreneur at heart. And by the time he left nCino, it had 1,600 employees – no longer a startup by most definitions.
“I was ready to try out something new in a sector that wasn’t quite as familiar as fintech,” he said. “I get excited about new and interesting technologies.”
While at nCino, Snell dabbled in web3 – a term technologists use to describe a new, decentralized internet focused on the use of blockchain. Part of his job at nCino was laying out new strategies, and as part of that he was tracking things like crypto and blockchain – and found it addictive. In talking to multiple customers, he found a pain point.
“They all share the same problems, which is, really, they didn’t understand who their users were and they couldn’t engage with them,” he said, noting that unlike so-called web2 companies, many of the firms in web3 were dealing with crypto wallets, which had their own set of challenges.
So he and his cohorts launched Raleon and found a crypto-specific investor to help them get started solving the problem. The team already knew how to build products.
“We wanted to surround ourselves with folks that knew crypto,” he said.
The firm’s flagship product, Embedded Quests, allows decentralized applications to configure their own “quests,” no coding required. The goal is to easily target specific users – think customer engagement – and provide rewards. According to Raleon, the company has designed a chat-like experience for brands to create personalized journeys in order to build relationships with their customers within their own websites.
With the latest raise, the founding team continues to be the company’s majority backer.