Llama, the cutting-edge access control and governance platform designed for smart contracts, proudly unveiled a significant milestone on Monday—the successful closure of a $6 million seed funding round. This funding initiative was spearheaded by renowned investors Founders Fund and Electric Capital.
In an exciting development, the platform has now been fully activated across all Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchains, as highlighted in the official announcement.
Founders Fund, a distinguished San Francisco-based venture capital firm co-founded by the visionary billionaire investor Peter Thiel, took the lead in this round. With a storied history since its establishment in 2005, Founders Fund has made strategic investments across diverse stages and sectors. Its illustrious portfolio boasts prominent names such as Lyft, Facebook, SpaceX, and Stripe.
The infusion of crypto expertise into Founders Fund earlier this year, courtesy of Joey Krug’s transition from co-chief investment officer at crypto investing giant Pantera, underscores the firm’s commitment to staying at the forefront of emerging trends.
Llama’s primary objective is to streamline and fortify the process for teams to establish governance within their protocols. The platform empowers protocols to meticulously define roles and permissions for executing transactions, covering critical functions like protocol upgrades, fund transfers, parameter adjustments, security updates, or emergency interventions during liquidity crises. The team has the flexibility to allocate varying levels of permission power to participants based on their specific roles. Llama users also benefit from the ability to set precise rules for token approvals and transfers, facilitated by an on-chain policy engine that ensures transparency in the configuration of permissions and roles.
In their announcement post, the Llama team emphasized the platform’s role in liberating engineering resources for protocols. They noted that, instead of investing valuable time in forking open-source frameworks, integrating complex access control modules, and cobbling together custom frontends, Llama provides an all-encompassing solution for access control and governance. This allows teams to concentrate on their core strengths—building innovative products.
The roster of investors in this round is equally impressive and includes Elad Gil, Sandeep Nailwal (co-founder of the Polygon blockchain), Stani Kulechov (founder of lending protocol Aave), Will Gaybrick, Amplify Partners, and FJ Labs.