Former a16z execs launch Bastion

Two former Andreessen Horowitz crypto division executives, Nassim Eddequiouaq and Riyaz Faizullabhoy, launched web3 startup Bastion this week with $25 million in seed funding.

Eddequiouaq was chief safety officer, whereas Faizullabhoy was chief expertise officer.

Together with the funding, Bastion launched a set of merchandise so firms can combine web3 infrastructure into their current enterprise applied sciences.

These embody possession and monetization of digital items, sensible transaction routing and buyer analytics, in line with the corporate. Bastion mentioned it “eliminates the necessity to individually supply options equivalent to custody, pockets administration and person onboarding.”

“We based Bastion to allow companies to onboard their merchandise and end-users right into a web3 setting with out the sophisticated, overwhelming expertise we all know at this time,” Eddequiouaq mentioned in a written assertion.

In the meantime, the funding spherical was led by their former employer, a16z crypto, who was joined by Autograph, Laser Digital Ventures, Not Boring Capital, Robotic Ventures, Alchemy Ventures and Aptos Ventures.

The corporate mentioned it intends to deploy the capital into scaling Bastion’s operations, engineering recruitment and securing further licensing to additional diversify its product choices.

The funding comes amid a difficult crypto setting, each funding-wise and exercise. My colleague Jacquelyn Melinek reported in July that crypto funding was down for a fifth straight quarter to $2.34 billion globally. She studies numerous causes for this, together with a push for extra stringent laws.

Nonetheless, all isn’t unhealthy. Earlier this week, Blockchain Capital closed on two funds, totaling $580 million, to put money into decentralized and centralized finance, decentralized and centralized infrastructure, gaming and shopper/social.

And Arianna Simpson, a16z’s normal companion, instructed Melinek throughout a starcrypto Disrupt 2023 panel this week that the crypto part might be wonderful, saying, “What we’ve seen is that the tempo of expertise growth and innovation isn’t correlated with the quantity of capital that’s flowing in at a given second.”