Framework Labs nabs $8m in funding round

Framework Labs, the sister company of Framework Ventures, has raised $8 million in a new seed round.

Station 13, an investment firm focusing on blockchain ventures related to sports, media, and entertainment, led the $8 million fundraising round for Framework Labs. Framework will use the funds to grow its team of researchers, traders, and engineers. The company has already hired former CTO and co-founder of decentralized exchange IDEX Ray Pulver and former principal at Wavemaker Partners Roy Learner.

According to an Aug. 27 report from Forbes, Framework Labs founders Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer have developed a new investment model called Network Capital to invest in DeFi companies at multiple stages.

Unlike venture capital firms, private equity firms, and hedge funds, which tend to focus on investing during just one stage of development, Framework Labs will invest at various stages and be able to incubate startups, provide staking, provision liquidity, and build new apps on top of protocols.

Spencer explained Framework Labs’ move towards decentralized finance, saying the technology was “coming into its own and beginning to achieve product-market fit at scale, yet traditional investors are asleep at the wheel when it comes to the category.”

“It isn’t enough to buy and hold tokens and provide ‘thought leadership’ — DeFi is not a spectator sport. Active participation, governance, building of consumer products, and advanced trading strategies are all part of the complex process of making a DeFi protocol successful.”

The Framework Labs founders have become prominent figures in the crypto space, with the largest investments outside the core teams in Chainlink (LINK) and Synthetix. Before founding Framework Ventures in 2019, the pair created and sold Hashletes, a company releasing non-fungible tokens. The company is also a major provider of liquidity on decentralized platform Uniswap.