Rainbow, a cryptocurrency startup that is developing a mobile wallet app that allows users to interact with decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain, has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Reddit’s Co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six.
Thirty-Five Ventures, founded by Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman; Vine founder Dom Hofmann’s Bloom Investment Holdings; Nikita Bier; Hyperguap; Uncommon Projects Capital; and Y Combinator were among the other investors in the round.
In Brief:
- The round closed in October 2021 following which the company has been on a hiring spree.
- Ohanian calls the app to be the best designed and easily understandable.
- Rainbow claims to be “design-centric” and intends to make NFT exchange as simple as calling an Uber.
The startup closed the round in October 2021 and has since hired more than 20 employees as it looks to scale its business to reach more users.
Rainbow’s emphasis on design convinced Ohanian to make the investment, calling it the “best designed” compared to other wallets available.
“User experience matters so much—[Rainbow’s] design choices are the reason they’ve already built a cult following and continue to educate and onboard scores of new users to Web3,” Alexis remarked.
Because of Web3 tools like Rainbow, kids are “going to have a very fundamental understanding of markets,” Alexis Ohanian.
Rainbow’s goal is to remove as much technical jargon as possible from the process, making tasks like buying or selling a multi-thousand-dollar NFT as simple as ordering an Uber.
“We’re trying to be the app on everyone’s home screens. Since the beginning, we’ve been super design-centric,” Rainbow co-founder Mike Demarais said in an interview.
The app allows users to connect to decentralized apps and invest in tokens through decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. Rainbow is intended to be a more streamlined and user-friendly mobile alternative to MetaMask, arguably the most well-known Ethereum wallet.
Rainbow’s wallet app is currently available for iOS devices, and a public beta version of its Android app was recently released.
This investment comes on the heels of Seven Seven Six’s recent announcement of a $500 million crypto fund, of which the company intends to allocate $300 million to funding crypto startups in their “early stages” and the remaining $200 million to backing up the companies when they break out.
