Enterprise Crypto Wallet Startup Pine Street Labs Raises $6M in Polychain-Led Round

Upstart crypto infrastructure company Pine Street Labs is trying to build a better business wallet with $6 million in funding from Polychain Capital and other top crypto venture capital firms.

Pine Street Labs wants to shake up the wallet experience for companies, funds, traders – really any business that needs to store tokens, says CEO Justin Gregorius. A veteran of crypto back offices, he told CoinDesk that enterprise newcomers find themselves in crypto wallet purgatory: They can’t rely on retail wallets like Ethereum’s MetaMask or Solana’s Phantom, but don’t have the know-how to build 10 wallets in-house.

Gregorius says his solution is a non-custodial crypto wallet API to let businesses plug and play across 12 different blockchains. Pine Street Labs’ five-person team takes care of the complex tech tuning – optimizing for staking in the Cosmos ecosystem, perhaps – so its novice clients won’t have to.

“We’re taking away the wallet engineering pains, the need for wallet engineers thinking in-house, “How do I build a DeFi, staking and NFT transaction on each different chain,’” Gregorius said of himself and co-founder Philip Glazman, referring to decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens.

The pair formed Pine Street Labs earlier this year after tackling some grant work building wallet infrastructure for Aleo and Umee. Gregorius said they realized there could be a niche for easy-to-use crypto wallet software that services multiple blockchains.

"The industry is under a lot of strain dealing with the proliferation of different blockchains,” Glazman told CoinDesk.

Their own time deep in the crypto ecosystem’s business trenches helped direct the mission, Gregorius said. Firms such as Andresseen Horowitz and CoinList may be well-suited to scale their operations across multiple chains, but novice businesses don’t always have that luxury. And as businesses, they can’t just turn to browser-based solutions.

“We realized from our day to day experience how difficult it is for businesses to extend their wallets to do the types of things on chain that they want to do,” Gregorius said.

Polychain Capital led the round with participation from Blockchain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Genesis, CoinList, Figment, and BECO Capital, Gregorius said.