Hedge Fund Giant Alan Howard Backs $7.5M Round for ‘Financial NFTs’ Project

Nested, a social trading platform that enables users to create and invest in “financial NFTs,” has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding in a round led by billionaire hedge fund investor Alan Howard.

Along with Howard, the round saw participation from big-name angels and investors across decentralized finance (DeFi), including Polychain Capital’s Joseph Eagan, and Lily Liu, whose bitcoin startup Earn.com was acquired by Coinbase for over $100 million in 2018.

Nested provides a way for people to invest in crypto portfolios that are hand-curated by the platform’s users. Investing in a Nested portfolio means buying a “NestedNFT,” a non-fungible token (NFT) that is tied to a portfolio’s underlying assets and allows one to buy or sell an entire portfolio in just a click.

Users who create a Nested portfolio are rewarded royalties each time their portfolio is replicated by another user, the company said, and investors in a portfolio can buy, sell or swap their holdings at any time.

Nested joins a growing crop of DeFi projects, like Index Coop and Housecat, that enable people to easily diversify their crypto investments through pre-packaged indexes and portfolios.

In describing what differentiates his project from others in the space, Nested Founder Rudy Kadoch explained to CoinDesk in an email, “Nested has been built by DeFi-native people for all people, compared to other DeFi platforms built by DeFi-native people for DeFi people.”

Moving forward, Kadoch says his aim with Nested is to democratize access to crypto, using NFTs to usher a new wave of people curious about crypto into decentralized finance.

“My mom knows what an NFT is,” writes Kadoch. “There is considerable hype around NFTs. But more importantly, retail investors, and even the public, have understood the concept of NFTs in a shorter time than it has taken for them to comprehend cryptocurrencies.”

As a new investor, crypto is overwhelming. Though we’re long past the token-crazed ICO mania of 2017, it remains difficult for the lay investor to differentiate established projects from transparent cash grabs – even as an emerging class of blue(er) chip tokens can sometimes seem around the corner.