Bima Labs, the developer behind the Bitcoin-backed stablecoin USBD, has recently announced a successful seed funding round of $2.25 million. The company plans to hire skilled personnel for its engineering and business development departments in order to grow its current six-person team.
Portal Ventures led the investment, and Draper Goren Blockchain, Sats Ventures, Luxor Technology, CoreDAO, and Halo Capital all made major contributions. Notable angel investors included Smokey of Berachain, Jeffrey Feng of Sei Labs, Brian Crain of Chorus One, and Ryan Fang of Ankr.
Funding Journey
Bima Labs, which was founded in April, moved quickly to raise funds and closed the round in three months. The CEO and founder, Siddarth Sridhar, revealed that the funding round was set up as equity with token warrants, but he withheld the company’s worth.
Bima Labs has developed USBD, a stablecoin backed by Bitcoin. What sets USBD apart is its innovative collateralization method, which allows users to mint the stablecoin by providing Bitcoin liquid staking and restaking tokens as collateral.
The system is designed to accept collateral from multiple blockchains, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin scaling networks, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks, and Solana.
“Users can deposit their Bitcoin liquid staking tokens (LSTs) and liquid restaking tokens (LRTs) from a wide variety of providers to mint USBD,” Sridhar explained. The list of providers includes Lorenzo, Lombard, pStake, Bedrock, Acre, DLC.link, and ALEX Labs BTC, among others.
The USBD stablecoin is designed for a variety of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, including lending, borrowing, and swapping, enabling users to earn rewards.
“We envision a world of new credit, debt, and hybrid use cases powered by USBD, whether you’re in China, the U.S., Brazil, or Europe,” Sridhar added, highlighting the global potential of the stablecoin.
Expansion Plans
Currently, USBD is live on a testnet, with the mainnet launch scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year. Bima Labs is also planning to introduce its own governance token, BIMA, around the same time. This token will be issued on an EVM-compatible chain, although the specific chain has yet to be decided.
Bima Labs’ decision to pivot from developing a stablecoin on Ethereum to focusing on Bitcoin is notable. Sridhar pointed out that the advancements that took years to achieve on Ethereum are being replicated on Bitcoin in a matter of months.
He emphasized Bitcoin’s higher total addressable market, greater asset utilization in regions like Latin America and the Middle East, and its potential to unlock higher yield opportunities.
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