DeFi Dashboard Zapper Raises $15M to Build On-Platform App Store

Zapper, the decentralized finance (DeFi) dashboard, has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Framework Ventures. The round was joined by actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

The crypto startup has soared in transaction volume and monthly active users since its November 2020 seed extension. Now supporting 54 DeFi protocols, it plans to launch an on-platform app store for developers and is working on a Zapper mobile app.

The raise pumps fresh capital into one of DeFi’s popular asset management tools. Zapper said it boasts 150,000 monthly active users and recently crossed the $3 billion in total transacted volume watermark. Its web app plugs into users’ wallets for easy balance viewing; it also lets users swap, stake and yield farm across multiple chains. 

CEO Seb Audet said the native app store will help Zapper keep up with the “exploding” ecosystem of DeFi products by letting the community pitch in with new features. Zapper’s in-house engineers have already integrated the platform with 54 protocols for one-stop viewing in a break from DeFi’s “fragmented” nature.

“Everything is fragmented, it's on a bunch of different apps living, different websites and web apps and our goal is really to reduce the friction and just have this one portal where you can track all your assets and manage and swap and farm,” Audet said.

He compared the coming app store to Shopify’s lucrative e-commerce app platform and said Zapper is looking into potential revenue models but hasn’t committed to one yet. 

Audet said Zapper’s team will continue building a product that makes it easy to plug into DeFi without burying the intricacies of crypto. 

“A lot of products focused on abstracting crypto completely,” he said. “And we're totally on the opposite side, like we want to actually let Web 3, let crypto shine.”

Previous Zapper seed investors Libertus Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Michael Dunworth, The LAO, CoinFund and Kain Warwick joined newcomers Nascent, ParaFi Capital, Scalar Capital, Distributed Global, Maven 11, Spartan Group, DeFiance Capital, Long Hash, Sino Global, Cooley LLP and Stani Kulechov in the Series A.