DeFi wallet startup Unstoppable Finance raises €12.5 million

Unstoppable Finance, a Berlin-based startup, secured a €12.5 million ($12.8 million) round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to launch a non-custodial crypto wallet.

Other investors in the Series A round include Speedinvest, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Backed VC, Inflection, Discovery Ventures, Fabric Ventures and Anagram, Unstoppable Finance told The Block. 

Unstoppable Finance was founded by SolarisBank founder Peter Grosskopf, former Soundcloud engineer Omid Aladini and Maximilian von Wallenberg-Pachaly, former CEO of the digital assets arm of Börse Stuttgart, Germany’s second-largest stock exchange.

Unstoppable’s wallet — called Ultimate — aims to draw on the slick user experience seen in fintech apps to attract crypto-curious retail investors. The team behind it thinks a more user-friendly experience, compared with crypto-native offerings such as MetaMask and Phantom, will draw in the masses. 

The company vets not only yield-earning protocols but also the decentralized exchanges it uses to swap tokens. Protocols can be directly accessed in-app, while existing services require users to manually connect with protocols they wish to access, according to Unstoppable’s founders. 

“What we do is integrate DeFi protocols deeply into the mobile front-end experience,” von Wallenberg-Pachaly said in an interview with The Block. “There’s no other wallet that does that.” 

While only allowing the user to access vetted protocols could be construed as adding another intermediary into the DeFi game, Lightspeed’s Banafsheh “B” Fathieh says there are already solutions in place for those who want to explore the DeFi ecosystem without such guidance. While Fathieh is part of the recently announced Faction — Lightspeed Venture’s blockchain fund — this particular deal was done via Lightspeed Ventures. 

“This product is for someone who doesn’t necessarily want to go through and read every crypto whitepaper,” she said in an interview with The Block. “The vast majority of people who want exposure to the space would really appreciate a technical set of eyes that guarantee safety.” 

The deal, which closed in July, comes at a time when valuations are stuttering across fintech and crypto firms in both the private and public markets.

While the company chose not to disclose its valuation, von Wallenberg-Pachaly said it’s a significant step up from when it closed its seed round in October of last year. He also claims that a significant portion of those seed funds are still in the bank and that the startup’s latest raise was motivated by a desire to grow faster, with eyes on the US market. 

Non-custodial crypto wallets give users the ability to hold cryptoassets and access one’s private keys without an intermediary. The company says it has over 300,000 pre-registers on its waiting list. 

While launching initially on the Solana blockchain as an iOS app in European territories, Unstoppable plans to implement Ethereum compatibility later this year with an Android version following. Last week, the Solana blockchain was subject to a hack that exposed nearly 8,000 wallets in its ecosystem. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.