Pond
Sector
Round Size ($USD)
$2,000,000.00
Post Valuation
$17,000,000.00
Stage
Existing Commitment
$1,000,000.00
Deal Type
Deal Stage
Deal Status
Ecosystem
Founder Name
Deal Source
Min Investment
$100k for vcs, no min for angels
Discord Thread Link
Website
Investment Memo / Deck
AMA
Date Approached
Oct 7, 2023
Description
OpenAI built LLM for the Internet, Pond is building Foundational GNN Models for Web3
TGE date
Description
OpenAI built LLM for the internet, Pond is building foundational GNN models for Web3. Pond’s GNN-powered AI models can power use cases across social, trading, and security applications. Pond enables independent market research, and helps detect and prevent malicious behaviors.
Pond combines on-chain data with social media sources - Twitter/X and Lens- to build and train models for behavioral analysis and prediction. Pondʻs GNN models aggregate information from neighboring nodes in the graph.
Pond is currently built on Ethereum and they are expanding to L2s with a focus on DeFi.
Business Model
B2B
- Gnn-processed Graph data API (subscription + usage-based)
Retail
- Graph Detector (subscription + commission, freemium)
- Marco Behavior Monitoring (subscription, freemium)
Developers
- SDK (licensing + usage-based)
Traction
- In three months since launch, the search engine has served 2,000 users and has >70% stickiness
- Partners
- Distribution - BlockEden.xyz
- Financial layer + algorithm - Dodo
- Social Layer + algorithm - Gitcoin, Equine
Go-to-Market
Retail
- business, product, and data-driven KOL marketing
- targeted marketing using Pondʻs social graph
- freemium model
Developers & Businesses
- retail products led to growth
- hackathons and events
- research collaborations with developer communities
- dedicated sales and b2b marketing
- investor referrals
Founders
- Dylan Zhang - ceo
- Garvey Wong - full-stack engineer
- Marco Cheng - research lead
- Pengcheng Yu - product + data researcher
Deal
$2mm at $17mm SAFE + token warrants pre-seed
BVI entity
Closing: end of October / first week of November
Deck
Commitments
40-50% committed
Evgeny Yurtaev - co-founder and CEO Zerion,
Cynthia Woo - co-founder and COO Matrixport
John Scianna - co-founder and CGO Niftyʻs
Curt Shi - managing partner Pro Digital
Jasper De Gooijie - co-founder and CTO Seda
Jack Sun - head of crypto Wonderstuck
Investment Memo