Pillow Digital Technologies Pte Ltd, which runs decentralised finance (DeFi) startup Pillow, said it
has secured a seed capital of $3 million (around Rs 22.5 crore) led by Elevation Capital.
The round also saw participation from Scott Lewis (Co-Founder, DeFi Pulse), JD Kanani and Sandeep Nailwal (Co-Founders, Polygon), Prabhakar Reddy (Co-Founder, FalconX), Aniket Jindal (Co-Founder, Biconomy), Ramakant Sharma (Livspace) and Farid Ahsan (Sharechat), among others.
Decentralised finance generally means a financial system that does not rely on centralised liaisons such as banks, stock exchanges or brokers. Instead, DeFi protocols use smart contracts to record transactions and transfer funds.
The firm plans to use the fresh funds to build ‘alpha-generating’ DeFi strategies for crypto assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coins, expand globally, develop goals of similar interest.
Pillow was set up by Arindam Roy, Rajath KM and Kartik Mishra in 2021. The platform claims to help generate interest on crypto assets by backing actively managed DeFi strategies.
Prior to this firm’s launch, Roy was working in startups like HyperVerge Inc, and Shopee, Km was also the part of HyperVerge, while Mishra had worked in Dunzo, Practo and Mckinsey in diffferent roles, as per their LinkedIn profiles.
The startup launched in December with the beta platform, claims to have grown organically and scaled to more than $1 million in assets under management on the back of their stablecoin strategy which provides a 17.8% yield, the company uses BitGo as its custodian.
“We want to create a future where accessibility to decentralized finance is democratized, if not more than traditional finance. We’re fulfilling this vision by letting our users gain access to DeFi yield opportunities in a simple, safe, and secure manner,” said Arindam Roy, CEO and Co-Founder of Pillow.
“We believe the next big unlock in Web 3.0 is going to come from significantly improving user experiences. Pillow fits right into that theme by abstracting away the complexities of DeFi - and hence making it more accessible,” Vaas Bhaskar, Principal, Elevation Capital, said.