Tagged: paradigm
9 results
Hang
Hang is a New York-based software company building an AI-powered marketing and loyalty platform for consumer brands. Marketed as 'the autonomous marketing system,' Hang replaces static points programs with personalized, gamified rewards - branded minigames, dynamic quests and 1:1 offers - alongside self-cleaning customer data, smart segments and AI-driven campaigns. It launched in 2022 as an NFT-powered membership platform backed by a $16M Series A from Paradigm, then repositioned around AI and now serves restaurant, beauty, apparel and e-commerce brands such as Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Hattie B's.
Jelena Djuric
Jelena Djuric is the co-founder and CEO of Noble, a blockchain built for issuing and moving stablecoins natively across the interchain. She started Noble in early 2023 with Stefan Coolican and John Letey after years working across the Cosmos, Dfinity and Celo ecosystems, and after helping found the Canadian Web3 Council. Noble powers native USDC on Cosmos and now connects roughly 50 blockchains, has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, and raised a $15 million Series A led by Paradigm in late 2024. Djuric's stated ambition is to make stablecoins as easy to send as a Venmo payment.
Matt Smolin
Matt Smolin is co-founder and CEO of Hang, a New York-based customer engagement and loyalty platform now positioning itself as an AI marketing system for restaurants, beauty and apparel brands. Hang originally launched in 2021 as an NFT-powered membership platform and raised a $16M Series A led by Paradigm in 2022, with backing from Tiger Global, Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures and MrBeast's Night Ventures. Under Smolin, the company has moved past its web3 branding into AI-driven segmentation, campaign automation and loyalty for brands like Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Taziki's.
Plural
Plural is a San Francisco fintech building the financial operating system for infrastructure - a programmable execution layer that tokenizes real-world energy assets like solar farms, battery storage, and data centers. It targets the 'missing middle' of clean energy: sub-$100M projects too small for traditional project finance but too big to ignore. By pairing smart-contract automation with a registered broker-dealer, Plural lets developers raise capital faster and lets institutional and alternative investors underwrite, monitor, and trade cash-flow streams from the electron economy.
Adam Silver
Adam Silver is the co-founder and CEO of Plural (Plural Finance / Plural Energy), a San Francisco startup building a financial operating system for energy infrastructure. Plural tokenizes real-world clean energy assets - solar arrays, batteries, and data centers - turning them into programmable, investable products, and runs a FINRA-member broker-dealer with a transfer agent license. A former Deloitte consultant and ServiceNow product lead, Silver became obsessed with what he calls 'the miracle of lights turning on,' then with the unacceptable difficulty of financing the assets behind it. In September 2025 Plural closed an oversubscribed $7.13M seed round led by Paradigm, bringing total funding to roughly $9.3M, with over $300M in distributed solar and battery assets available for investment.
Dan Robinson
Dan Robinson is a General Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm, one of the most influential crypto venture firms in the world. A former litigation attorney turned protocol engineer, he co-authored 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' - the paper that defined MEV for the industry - and played a central role in designing Uniswap V2 and V3. Robinson joined Paradigm in 2019 as its first Research Partner, was later promoted to General Partner, and has published foundational work on MEV taxes, Gradual Dutch Auctions, and prediction market AMMs. His rare combination of legal training and deep blockchain engineering makes him one of crypto's most distinctive voices at the intersection of mechanism design and decentralized finance.
Dan Robinson
Dan Robinson is General Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm, one of crypto's most influential investment and research firms. A Harvard-trained lawyer turned protocol engineer, Robinson has co-authored landmark papers including the 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' MEV essay, the Uniswap v3 whitepaper, and the Blend NFT lending protocol. His work sits at the intersection of mechanism design, mathematical finance, and open-source software - making him one of the rare figures who shapes both how DeFi protocols are built and how capital flows into them.
Fred Ehrsam
Fred Ehrsam (Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III) is a serial founder and investor who co-founded Coinbase in 2012 — the crypto exchange that went public on Nasdaq in 2021 — and Paradigm in 2018, the research-driven crypto VC firm that raised a $2.5 billion fund. Now he's chasing his next frontier: Nudge, a non-invasive brain-computer interface startup using focused ultrasound to modulate brain states, which raised $100 million in Series A funding in 2025. A Duke computer science graduate turned Goldman Sachs FX trader, Ehrsam discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and never looked back — quietly becoming one of the most influential architects of the crypto industry while building a reputation as a deep thinker obsessed with pushing the boundaries of human capability.
Matt Huang
Matt Huang is co-founder and Managing Partner of Paradigm, the research-driven crypto investment firm he launched with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam in 2018. With $12.7 billion in AUM and foundational investments in Uniswap, Optimism, Flashbots, and dozens of other protocols, Huang transformed venture capital by treating his firm as a hybrid research lab, engineering organization, and fund. The son of a Goldman Sachs derivatives head and a pioneering computer science professor, he turned a $500K bet on a language-barrier pitch from Zhang Yiming into an estimated $500M windfall. In 2025, he added founding CEO of Tempo - the Stripe-Paradigm blockchain for global payments - to his portfolio, while raising a new $1.5B fund to expand into AI and robotics.