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Yearn’s Cronje Backs $10M Funding Round for DeFi’s Instadapp

The India-based startup will use the funding to continue developing a “middleware” layer for the DeFi ecosystem.

Updated May 9, 2023, 3:20 a.m. Published Jun 11, 2021, 5:57 p.m.

Instadapp co-founders Sowmay Jain and Samyak Jain in a photo from 2019.

Instadapp announced Friday the completion of a $10 million funding round that was led by Standard Crypto and included Andre Cronje, the founder of Yearn.Finance, a crypto investing platform.

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Instadapp serves an important function in decentralized finance (DeFi): It bridges the gap between various projects by creating a so-called “middleware” layer that allows developers to build applications that are compatible between DeFi protocols and crypto payment gateways.

This is not the company’s first foray into fundraising. In 2019, the India-based team raised $2.4 million from prominent crypto investors, including Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and others.

Instadapp’s funding round is one of many such investments into DeFi startups in recent months, despite the crypto market’s recent bearish turn.

Instadapp plans to use the funding to continue building out its middleware layer, the firm said in an email.

DeFi InstaDApp Yearn Finance Andre Cronje

Cheyenne Ligon

On the news team at CoinDesk, Cheyenne focuses on crypto regulation and crime. Cheyenne is originally from Houston, Texas. She studied political science at Tulane University in Louisiana. In December 2021, she graduated from CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she focused on business and economics reporting. She has no significant crypto holdings.