This Arbitrum PerpDEX exchange just raised $10.3 million from Dragonfly Capital!
Today (October 24), the Arbitrum derivatives exchange named Variational announced that it successfully raised $10.3 million in its Seed Round.
This funding round was co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia), with participation from renowned investment funds such as Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, HackVC, North Island Ventures and other investors.
Lucas Schuermann (CEO and Co-founder of Variational) said that the project started operating incognito since January 2022, as a Market Maker (MM) for 2 years and has been profitable.
Variational then pivoted to building its own DeFi protocol, with their first product being Omni, a platform that supports trading of perpetual futures contracts.
Omni is currently live as a Testnet on the Arbitrum Sepolia network and will migrate to Arbitrum One upon Mainnet launch. OLP (Omni Liquidity Provider) aggregates liquidity from CEXs, DEXs, and other OTC platforms to enable traders to trade novel product pairs.
Variational’s second product is Pro – a platform for institutional traders. In the future, the platform plans to support DeFi applications such as Lending, Yield Farming, …
Lucas Schuermann said that the company has launched the Testnet and is preparing to launch the Mainnet so they decided to go public with information about the Seed Round.
Schuermann was vice president of engineering at Genesis Global Trading before co-founding Variational with Edward Yu, who was Genesis’s head of quantitative research. The pair left Genesis in 2021 before the company shut down in 2023.
Schuermann revealed that the Public Mainnet is expected to launch in Q1 2025, but the Private Mainnet for special audiences will be launched in late 2024.
He also revealed that Variational’s own token will be issued shortly after the Mainnet goes live. The project will expand to other blockchains in the future, including leading Layer 1 and Layer 2 projects.
Variational currently has a team of about 7 employees with headquarters in the Cayman Islands. The company plans to increase to about 10 - 15 employees by the middle of next year, focusing on recruiting for the Marketing, Growth, ...
