Animoca Brands and Paradigm back Argent in $40 million Series B round

The developer of the mobile Ethereum wallet Argent has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round, according to The Block.

The round was led by venture firms Fabric Ventures and Metaplanet, owned by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. New investors included Starkware, Jump Crypto and Animoca Brands. Existing investors increased their stakes: Paradigm, Index Ventures and Creandum.

The Argent team will use the funds to support a broader range of activities in DeFi and Web 3.0.

“We remain very focused on finance, but would like to play a bigger role in other applications of non-fungible tokens, such as NFT gaming or virtual real estate. We want to become the de facto wallet for games,” said Argent co-founder and CEO Itamar Lesuisse.

Users of the app can already store some NFTs by connecting to marketplaces such as OpenSea.

According to Lesuisse, the startup will also allocate part of the funding to expanding services in Latin America, with Mexico as a priority where demand is high.

In addition, Argent plans to increase the staff of financial and legal specialists, and to form a new research group focused on L2 protocols.

The Argent wallet uses the zkSync solution for Ethereum scaling from Matter Labs. The startup’s other app — Argent X — is based on a competing solution StarkNet from StarkWare. Lesuisse described StarkWare’s participation in the round as “strategic”.

Earlier in November 2021 StarkWare raised $50 million at a $2 billion valuation. In March it was revealed that after a planned $100 million funding round, the startup’s valuation could rise to $6 billion.