Tagged: solana
22 resultsBlackbird Labs
Blackbird Labs is a New York-based restaurant technology company that pairs a consumer dining app with a blockchain-based payments and loyalty network. Founded in 2022 by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, Blackbird lets diners check in at participating restaurants, earn a rewards currency called $FLY, and pay their bill through the app, while giving restaurants lower payment-processing fees and direct ownership of their guest data. The company runs its own layer-2 network, Flynet, and operates in New York, San Francisco, and Charleston with roughly 1,000 restaurants on the platform.
Fin
Fin is a New York-based stablecoin payments company building a mobile app for high-value, global, and instant money movement. Founded by ex-Citadel engineers Ian Krotinsky and Aashiq Dheeraj - the team behind TipLink - Fin unifies balances into USDC and lets users and businesses send millions of dollars in near real time to other Fin users, bank accounts, or crypto wallets. In December 2025 it raised a $17M Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating, to launch a product aimed at import/export businesses and high-value transfers that traditional banks handle slowly and expensively.
Nous Research
Nous Research is an open-source AI lab founded in 2023 that builds world-class open-weight language models - most notably its Hermes family - and decentralized infrastructure for training them. Its Psyche network coordinates heterogeneous GPUs across the internet via the Solana blockchain, offering a community-driven, transparent alternative to closed labs like OpenAI. Backed by Paradigm and others, the company positions open, unrestricted models as a counterweight to centralized AI.
Ian Krotinsky
Ian Krotinsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fin, a New York based payments company that uses stablecoin infrastructure to move large sums of money instantly across borders. A former quantitative portfolio manager and trader at Citadel, he and co-founder Aashiq Dheeraj first built TipLink, a tool for sending crypto with a link, before rebranding around a broader ambition: to build the payments app of the future for high-value transfers. In December 2025 the company raised a $17 million Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating.
CoinList
CoinList is a San Francisco-based crypto platform that gives investors early access to new token sales and blockchain networks before they list on exchanges. Spun out of AngelList in 2017, it pioneered compliant token distribution with KYC/AML and accredited-investor verification, and has run primary sales for projects including Filecoin, Solana, Near and Algorand. In 2025 the company began shifting to a fully non-custodial, onchain model that delivers tokens directly into user-controlled wallets.
Huma Finance
Huma Finance is the first PayFi (Payment Financing) network, a blockchain protocol that lets businesses and payment providers borrow stablecoin liquidity against real-world receivables and invoices, settling cross-border payments and card transactions in seconds instead of days. Liquidity providers deposit USDC and earn double-digit yield sourced from the fees borrowers pay for that instant settlement. Founded in 2022 and built natively on Solana, Huma has processed more than $4.5 billion in transaction volume and launched its HUMA governance token in May 2025.
Slingshot
Slingshot is a San Francisco-based crypto trading app that lets people buy, sell, and swap hundreds of thousands of tokens across multiple blockchains from a single USDC balance - hiding the usual friction of wallets, bridges, and gas fees behind a clean consumer interface. Founded in 2020 by Coinbase alum Clinton Bembry, it raised roughly $18M through a Ribbit Capital-led Series A and was acquired by NFT marketplace Magic Eden in April 2025.
BAXUS
BAXUS is a New York-based peer-to-peer marketplace for fine and rare wines and spirits, built on the Solana blockchain. It authenticates physical bottles, stores them in climate-controlled vaults, and issues digital tokens representing direct ownership - giving collectors and institutions real-time pricing, instant trade settlement, and the ability to use bottles as loan collateral. The platform has facilitated over $20 million in whiskey trades and raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital in 2024.
Sphere Labs
Sphere Labs is a Boston- and Delaware-based fintech building the payments infrastructure for the stablecoin economy. Founded in 2022 by Arnold Lee and Luigi Charles, the company runs two products: SpherePay, a B2B cross-border payments API that moves money using a 'stablecoin sandwich' - converting local currency into a stablecoin, routing it across borders, then settling into the destination currency in 15-30 minutes; and SphereNet, a 'sovereign-grade' settlement ledger built on the Solana Virtual Machine for regulated financial institutions. Often described as a 'Stripe for crypto,' Sphere pairs developer-friendly APIs and SDKs with embedded compliance to help fintechs, institutions and businesses in emerging markets move value fast, transparently and legally. It raised a $5M strategic round in December 2024 led by Coinbase Ventures and Kraken Ventures.
Audius
Audius is a decentralized music streaming and discovery platform that lets artists upload, share, and monetize tracks directly to fans without traditional gatekeepers. Built on Solana and Ethereum and powered by the AUDIO token, the platform runs on a network of community-operated content and discovery nodes - giving creators ownership of their catalogs and a direct line to listeners.
Arnold Lee
Arnold Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Sphere Labs, the software company behind SpherePay, a cross-border stablecoin payments API, and SphereNet, a Solana-virtual-machine settlement ledger built for regulated fintechs. A Columbia computer science grad who first stumbled into Bitcoin in 2009 trying to buy video games, he spent his early career in embedded systems for IoT startups before incorporating Sphere a week after the FTX collapse, off the back of a global Stripe hackathon win and a stint in Jump Crypto's incubator. Sphere now moves billions in annual volume through corridors legacy banking forgot - Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East - on the thesis that every payments company eventually becomes a compliance company.
Tzvi Wiesel
Tzvi Wiesel, who also goes by Todd, is the co-founder and CEO of BAXUS, an on-chain marketplace for rare wine and spirits built on Solana. A former fine-and-rare bottle and cask trader, he set out to fix what he calls an antiquated, broken secondary market for collectible liquids by giving each bottle a tokenized, tamper-proof record of provenance and ownership. Under his lead BAXUS acquired the collection-tracking app BoozApp, raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital, and now connects thousands of collectors, brands and institutions worldwide. He is also a working whiskey reviewer, heading the US reviews team at The Whiskey Wash.
Jordan Birnholtz
Jordan Birnholtz is a serial founder turned intellectual-property litigator who keeps building at the seam between law, finance, and technology. He co-founded PawnGuru, a marketplace that brought 1.5M+ underbanked Americans online to pawn shops; helped progressives organize through The Tuesday Company's Team app; and as co-founder and CMO of Neon put the world's first NFT vending machine on a New York sidewalk. After earning his J.D. cum laude from Northwestern, he now practices IP litigation at Kirkland & Ellis while co-founding Trarian, a venture underwriting patent-invalidity risk across what he calls the trillion-dollar patent asset class.
Akash Sinha
Akash Sinha, who goes by 'Sky,' is a Web3 and DeFi commentator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He builds an audience on LinkedIn around Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems, posting frequently from crypto conferences like Solana Breakpoint and Token2049 and weighing in on tech-policy moments such as the TikTok ban debate.
Raghav Gulati
Raghav Gulati is a San Francisco-based technologist and executive who built CoinList into one of crypto's most recognized token launch platforms before transitioning to partner at Ravikant Capital. A University of Georgia mathematics graduate who cut his teeth as a software engineer at companies like Backplane and Shyp, Gulati rose through CoinList from engineer to CEO, helping orchestrate landmark token sales including Solana's early raise. His vision: make regulated token launches as accessible to 330 million Americans as equity markets, with Solana as the decentralized NASDAQ.
Alfred Chuang
Alfred Chuang is the General Partner of Race Capital, a San Francisco venture firm investing in Web2 and Web3 infrastructure. Before becoming a VC, he co-founded BEA Systems in 1995 and led it as CEO until Oracle bought it in 2008 for $8.6 billion. Andreessen Horowitz has called him the Silicon Valley CEO's CEO.
Shamal Ranasinghe
Shamal Ranasinghe is the Chief Business Officer at Audius, the decentralized blockchain-based music streaming platform. A 25-year music-tech veteran, he co-founded Topspin Media in 2007 - one of the first direct-to-fan platforms for musicians - before spending eight years as VP of Product at Pandora/SiriusXM building creator tools. At Audius, he leads major label and publishing deals, including a landmark global licensing agreement with Kobalt Music in 2024, while championing a world where artists own their music, keep 90% of revenue, and connect directly with fans without gatekeepers.
Ali Yahya
Ali Yahya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the firm's crypto investing practice. A Stanford computer scientist and former Google Brain TensorFlow developer, he discovered Bitcoin in 2010 during security research and joined a16z in 2017 as its first full-time crypto investor. He has backed landmark bets including Solana and LayerZero, and is known for his deep technical thesis on privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, and the intersection of AI and crypto infrastructure. Off the charts, he runs a personal life operating system called walrOS built on 16 daily tracked habits and a spaced-repetition learning system.
Ross Shuel
Ross Shuel is Network Operations Partner at a16z Crypto, the crypto-focused arm of Andreessen Horowitz. A West Point graduate and former U.S. Army Ranger with seven years of military service including a deployment to Afghanistan, Shuel brought a systems-thinker's discipline to crypto governance. At a16z Crypto, he helps portfolio companies navigate the full arc of decentralized governance - from network launch and governance design to on-chain participation as protocols mature. He co-authored research on application token economics and has appeared on the web3 with a16z podcast discussing DAO governance attacks. His ENS identity, shuel.eth, reflects his deep embeddedness in the on-chain world he helps shape.
Chris Burniske
Chris Burniske is a partner and co-founder of Placeholder, a venture capital firm that has invested in over 75 blockchain companies and networks since 2017. He co-authored the influential book 'Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond' and led ARK Invest to become the first public fund manager to offer bitcoin exposure in 2015. Known for his unconventional approach - famously rolling up barefoot on a skateboard to pitch Cathie Wood - Burniske combines deep technical knowledge with a surfer's mentality toward finding uncrowded opportunities in crypto markets.
Joel Monegro
Joel Monegro is a Managing Partner and Co-founder of Placeholder, a New York City-based venture capital firm that invests exclusively in decentralized blockchain networks and cryptoassets. Best known for authoring the seminal 2016 essay 'Fat Protocols' - one of the most influential frameworks in crypto investing - he built Union Square Ventures' blockchain thesis before launching Placeholder in 2017 with Chris Burniske. A former Dominican Republic government technology official turned VC, he is also an amateur competitive racing driver who races under @racingpapi with the Dominican flag proudly displayed.
Nader Dabit
Nader Dabit is a developer relations leader, educator, and engineer who built a career from scratch after starting to code at 30. From React Native expert to AWS advocate to Web3 bridge-builder, he has spent the last decade making complex technology accessible to developers everywhere. A founder of DeveloperDAO, author of two O'Reilly-family books, and now working at Cognition on AI software agents, Nader is the rare person who connects technical depth with community instinct - and has the self-taught story to prove it.