Guesser, a user-friendly interface built atop the Augur (REP) decentralized oracle and prediction market protocol, has secured $1.1 million in seed funding from several crypto-friendly venture capital funds.
For Guesser, whose team works out of the Spanish capital of Madrid, the injection of capital provides them with “the opportunity to build a top team of highly driven people, define market distribution, as well as act as a high liquidity provider in some markets,” co-founder and CEO José Garay stated on Thursday in Guesser’s blog post.
Guesser also used the funding announcement to reveal they are increasing their offering from one to four ‘Bet of the Week’ categories: crypto, finance, politics, and general news. All four will enjoy “extra liquidity from the company,” Garay added.
While Augur can be too complicated and time consuming for the average user, we’re building a user-friendly interface that abstracts away the complexity of cryptocurrencies and makes investing in prediction markets as engaging and frictionless as investing in coins or stocks.” – Garay
As announced in Guesser’s blog post on Thursday, there were a total of three funds involved in the $1.1 million seed round. Co-leading the raise was Version One – which has previously invested in the likes of Coinbase, Blockstack (STX), Celo, CryptoKitties, and Lolli – and Compound, a New York-based, technology-focused fund that has previously backed many projects native to the crypto industry including Casa, Livepeer (LPT), CryptoKitties, Mattereum, Orchid, and Kadena.
Publishing a blog post to elaborate on why Version One invested in Guesser, founding partner Boris Wertz pointed out the fact “the Guesser team is based in Madrid and European regulators are much more welcoming to crypto start-ups and online betting activity;” a key challenge his venture capital firm identified upon learning about Augur midway through last year.
Guesser’s other seed investor was Boost VC, the San Mateo-based accelerator co-founded and managed by Adam Draper – son of renowned venture capitalist, Tim Draper. Acknowledged as the first fund to support the Bitcoin ecosystem, Boost VC recently kicked off Tribe 12, the latest of its three-month-long accelerator programs of which Guesser is a part of.
Adding a never-before-seen element to Guesser’s $1.1 million seed round, the investment from Boost VC was in fact denominated in Dai (DAI), the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin inherent to the Ethereum-based Maker (MKR) smart contract platform.
The post Crypto Investors Bet $1.1M on Guesser Prediction Market Startup in Historic Fundraise appeared first on Cryptocoin Spy.
