Sherlock, a risk-analysis system for decentralized finance (DeFi), raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed funding round.
Announced Thursday, the fundraising was led by IDEO CoLab Ventures, with participation from A.Capital Ventures, Scalar Capital and DeFi Alliance.
Insurance in crypto is rare, and providing peace of mind within the experimental DeFi space is limited to a handful of solutions, such as Nexus Mutual’s decentralized risk pool approach.
Sherlock uses smart-contract security experts to assess the fundamental risk attached to DeFi platforms. It already has a long list of angel investors, including executives and developers from firms including Aave, Synthetix and Quantstamp.
“Fundamental risk analysis and covering protocols directly is a heavy lift,” Gavin McDermott, partner at IDEO CoLab Ventures in a statement. “But if Sherlock’s model can scale to a meaningful percentage of TVL in DeFi, their network will significantly improve safety for the entire industry.”
CORRECTION (JUNE 3 12:18 UTC): Corrects spelling of investor’s name to Synthetix.