Paradigm leads $11.5 million funding round in Kuru Labs, a decentralized exchange blending CLOBs and AMMs

Venture capital firm Paradigm has led the Series A $11.5 million funding round for Kuru Labs, a startup building a decentralized exchange on the high-performance Ethereum-compatible Monad Layer 1.

Kuru uses a "hybrid CLOB-AMM model" that combines the automated market maker (AMM) functions often seen in crypto with the central limit order book (CLOB) architecture true to traditional exchanges to achieve a new level of functionality.

"Each order book comes with a default market maker, and the strategy that the market maker follows is that of an AMM," Kuru co-founder Vaibhav Prakash told The Block in an interview. "So you will always have liquidity to trade against. It might not be the best price because it's still an AMM, but it still offers you the benefits of placing limit orders natively."

In other words, Kuru is designed so that it doesn’t necessarily need to work with traditional market makers.

Angel investors include 0xDesigner, Viktor Bunin, Zagabond, Tristan Yver, Kevin Pang, Will Price, Alex Watts, Jordan Hagan, 3nes, Shreyas Hariharan, Auri, and Joe Takayama. The firm raised about $2.2 million in seed funding.

"Paradigm really makes sense for us because it has actually helped a lot of exchanges onchain take off," Prakash said. "They really understand market dynamics and microstructure. Their investments in Ellipsis Labs, Sorella Labs, Uniswap all mean that the people we work with at Paradigm really understand how markets work onchain. I don't think we would have been happier with any other VC doing this for us."