Treehouse, a Web3 company that aims to transform on-chain data into meaningful metrics to help decentralized finance (DeFi) investors make informed financial decisions, recently secured an US$18 million seed funding round.

Led by an undisclosed large fintech investor, the funding round included the participation of notable names such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Binance, MassMutual Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Jump Capital, GSR, Wintermute, Do Kwon of Terraform Labs, and senior executives from SoftBank Vision Fund.

The company managed to secure this funding round within just 11 months since its founding. When asked by e27 about how they managed to do this, Treehouse CEO Brandon Goh said that in their early days, the company simply focused on executing its vision.

“Fundraising hardly crossed our minds as we were too engrossed in delivering! However, within six months of our inception, we managed to build a market-first working prototype with the little resources we had. Investor interests came in quite organically after that, and one thing led to another,” he writes in an email.

“That said, many strategic partners supported us early on when Treehouse was just an idea! Yusho (Co-Founder & CEO of Coinhako), and my ex-colleague Qijian (now the Co-Founder & CIO of Moonvault Capital) are two good friends who were extremely supportive in helping us start this venture.”

Treehouse has many plans with the new funding, but they are mostly centred around expanding its flagship product Harvest. The platform indexes blockchains and deconstructs users’ DeFi positions to present historical data, profit and loss (P&L), and risk metrics on a “seamless and highly intuitive” user interface.

The analytics platform provides information previously unavailable in DeFi and aims to establish a standard for users to analyse the DeFi risks associated with their current and historical positions.

Also Read: Demystifying NFTs and DeFi

It was built as a reflection of the team’s commitment to financial inclusion. Since its founding in mid-2021, Treehouse says that it has grown exponentially to over 100 people and launched Harvest Beta.

DeFying the status quo

As a promising new technology, DeFi has been gaining praise here and there for its potential in reshaping the traditional financial system, as dubbed by CNBC. Undergoing massive growth in 2020 due to tech advancement and increased liquidity access, experts claim it as the “next big thing” in crypto when it only account five per cent of the industry at the moment.

When asked about the problem that Treehouse tries to solve, Goh points out that despite being one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21st century, DeFi is still in its infancy and lacks many of the essential tools required for the space to mature.

“While several existing portfolio tools are available, many of the world’s largest DeFi funds still elect to use Excel given how inadequate these platforms are. Our product differs in our focus to provide institutional-grade analytics comparable to tools found in traditional asset classes,” he says.

The company was founded after the team fiddled with portfolio tools for over a year while trying to navigate the early days of DeFi.

“We could not find a platform with the type of analytics, historical metrics, and accurate risk breakdowns that we were accustomed to, so we decided to build one on our own. Before Treehouse, our team worked in traditional finance and technology firms like Point72, Revolut, and BNP Paribas. I worked on the fixed income team at Morgan Stanley but was already long convinced to join the space by that point in time,” Goh says.

According to the CEO, users of Treehouse platforms are retail and institutional investors who are active participants in the DeFi ecosystem.

Also Read: The unrealised importance of DeFi in fixed-income securities investments

“Given how nascent the space is, both spectra of users want the same tools. Most of our users seek transparency, platform reliability, security, and meaningful data analytics. More importantly, we pride ourselves on being community-first. Fostering a community of users who can learn and grow with Treehouse in their DeFi journey is to us the most fulfilling way of acquiring and retaining users,” he says.

Bridging to the future

When asked about the prospects of DeFi in Southeast Asia (SEA), Goh points out the financial access inequality that is prevalent in many SEA societies.

“In today’s legacy financial system, the everyday person lacks access to financial instruments that should be available to all. This gradual widening in financial resource inequality perpetuates many of the issues faced by societies today. More than 290 million people are unbanked within the ASEAN region, and only 18 per cent have access to credit,” he elaborates.

“DeFi can help bridge this gap and solve these real-world challenges. Beyond that, DeFi in SEA has been growing its presence day by day, not just in terms of user adoption but also in investments and job opportunities. Last year, over a billion was raised by SEA DeFi startups, and this development is unlikely to slow,” the CEO continues.

And this is the opportunity that Treehouse wants to pursue. Goh states that for the company, this funding round is just the beginning of their journey: They have many big plans in addition to improving their infrastructure and hiring world-class talents.

“We plan to use the funds raised to build a one-stop-shop for users to manage, trade, and hedge their DeFi positions. Treehouse will enable users to act on real-time information with the ease of clicking a button. We will build an ecosystem of products to empower the everyday DeFi investor to be confident of manoeuvring and protecting their financial health!” he closes.

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Image Credit: Treehouse

The post With a US$18M seed funding round, Treehouse is ready to bridge financial inclusion gap with DeFi appeared first on e27.