“Pivot from crypto to AI” turned a chorus in Silicon Valley after ChatGPT launched in 2022. Opportunistic founders seemed to leap from one flagging hype cycle to the newer, shinier factor in tech. Vladimir Novakovski, although, pivoted from AI to crypto—and he’s attracted a who’s who of traders to again his startup Lighter, one of many quickest rising tasks in digital belongings.
Lighter is each a decentralized alternate designed to not be managed by a single entity in addition to a blockchain. It permits customers to commerce perpetual futures, a kind of by-product that lets merchants speculate on future costs for cryptocurrencies. It can additionally quickly roll out spot buying and selling for tokens like Bitcoin, Novakovski mentioned.
On Tuesday, Lighter introduced that it has raised $68 million in a brand new funding spherical. Based on the 40-year-old Novakovski, who based Lighter in 2022 and serves as CEO, the fundraise was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the fintech investor Ribbit Capital. Different individuals included Haun Ventures and the web brokerage Robinhood, which not often makes enterprise investments.
The spherical valued Lighter at round $1.5 billion, in response to two sources acquainted with the deal, who requested for anonymity to debate non-public enterprise dealings. Novakovski declined to touch upon Lighter’s valuation however mentioned the deal was for fairness and token warrants, or allocations of a yet-to-be-released cryptocurrency.
“What we want to do is to be the infrastructure layer that verifies that everything that happens in finance happens fairly, happens correctly, happens transparently,” Novakovski mentioned in an interview.
Buying and selling to AI to buying and selling
The fundraise for Lighter comes amid a wave of buzz for crypto “perps,” or perpetuals. These are derivatives common within the crypto business and let merchants maintain futures contracts that don’t expire, supplied they keep the required margin requirement.
Whereas so-called perps have been round for years, the latest rise of Hyperliquid, one other decentralized alternate, has shaken up the market. With solely 11 workers, Hyperliquid cofounder Jeff Yan managed to problem centralized behemoths like Binance, which has responded by carefully aligning itself with its personal Hyperliquid competitor: Aster.
Lighter is getting into an intensely aggressive market, however Novakovski has the mental chops to compete. “Vlad and the team that he’s built is like 85% to 90% of why we made the investment,” Joey Krug, a companion at Founders Fund, instructed Fortune.
After Novakovski immigrated from Russia to the U.S. as a baby, he gained a spot on the U.S. nationwide groups for the Worldwide Olympiad in informatics and physics. On the age of 16, he went to Harvard, graduated early, and, at solely 18 years outdated, started working on the hedge fund Citadel Funding Group. (Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel, personally recruited him, Novakovski mentioned.)
Novakovski then had an nearly 15-year profession at numerous corporations as an engineer and dealer earlier than he turned a founder himself. In 2017, he created a startup with Scott Wu, whom Novakovski beforehand labored with on the funding agency Addepar; and Hayley Leibson, whom Novakovski met amongst techies in San Francisco. They based Lunchclub, an AI-powered platform for social networking.
The trio raised round $30 million, and, at first of the pandemic, noticed their product entice a swathe of remoted customers seeking to meet new individuals. However, in 2022, development plateaued. “We had three paths, which is: try to make it into something profitable but small, try to figure out a way for it to go from what it was to like a TikTok or Snapchat, which didn’t seem particularly viable,” mentioned Novakovski. “The third path: to pivot to something else we were really excited about.”
Wu left Lunchclub to discovered the AI coding startup Cognition, which has since notched a valuation of $10.2 billion, and Leibson based one other AI startup she offered in 2024. Novakovski determined to return to his roots as a dealer.
He pivoted Lunchclub to Lighter, retained 80% of the group, and raised a brand new stash of capital: $21 million in a beforehand unreported spherical in 2024 led by Haun Ventures and Craft Ventures. Different individuals included Dragonfly and Robotic Ventures. That, mixed with Lighter’s most up-to-date spherical, places the quantity that Lighter has raised thus far at nearly $90 million.
After two years of improvement and testing, he launched Lighter in January. Versus Hyperliquid, which runs by itself layer 1 blockchain, Lighter runs by itself layer 2 on Ethereum, which Novakovski talked about as a key distinguisher between the 2 competing merchandise.
Lighter’s blockchain has rapidly grow to be one of many high layer 2 blockchains on Ethereum by whole quantity locked, or the entire quantity of funds on a blockchain, in response to information from the crypto analytics web site L2BEAT. And his enterprise is already worthwhile, Novakovski mentioned. “We’re pretty happy about our position right now,” he added, when requested about how his product compares to Hyperliquid, “but we’re working hard.”
Replace, Nov. 12, 2025: Added in that Hayley Leibson was additionally a cofounder for Lunchclub.
