Lighter just pulled in a fresh $68 million led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital, with Robinhood and Haun Ventures joining in – a rare lineup that signals real confidence in the project. Sources told Fortune the round valued the company at around $1.5 billion, putting it among the most notable raises in the current crypto cycle.
The size of the deal makes more sense once you know the person behind it.
Vladimir Novakovski has never been someone who follows the crowd. While much of Silicon Valley sprinted into AI, he headed back to trading. That choice looks a lot smarter today than it might have in 2022.
Long before crypto entered the picture, Novakovski [pictured above] was known for his early academic rise: He moved to the U.S. as a kid, competed on the U.S. national teams for the International Olympiad in informatics and physics, started Harvard at 16, and then, as he said to Fortune, “Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel, personally recruited him” at 18. He spent nearly 15 years across engineering and trading roles before becoming a founder.
His first big startup was Lunchclub, an AI-powered networking platform. It grew fast during the pandemic, then plateaued. The team had to choose a future. As he told Fortune, “We had three paths, which is: try to make it into something profitable but small, try to figure out a way for it to go from what it was to like a TikTok or Snapchat, which didn’t seem particularly viable. The third path: to pivot to something else we were really excited about.”
His co-founders stayed in AI. He returned to markets.
That pivot became Lighter, built as both a decentralized exchange and a blockchain. It supports perpetual futures today, with spot trading on the way. After two years of development, it launched in January and reached profitability quickly. Earlier this year, Lighter raised $21 million in a round led by Haun Ventures and Craft Ventures. With the new capital, total fundraising now sits close to $90 million.
The market context around this raise matters, too. Crypto funding began warming up again in early November, with more than $1 billion going into new projects. Ripple raised $500 million. Lava picked up $200 million. Investors appear to be moving toward infrastructure, the sort of plumbing that supports real volume, real users, and clear market structure.
Lighter checks those boxes. The exchange claims to handle around 650,000 transactions per second and recently logged $73.77 billion in weekly perpetual trading volume, a level that shows appetite from both retail users and more sophisticated traders. The company reports that this fresh capital will go toward improving transparency, strengthening throughput, and expanding systems suited for institutional activity.
The deal also included token subscription rights, reflecting the blended structures investors now accept in crypto. And with a community airdrop coming in Q4 – up to 30% of the token supply for early users – attention around the company’s token generation event has started to climb.
Through all of this, Novakovski has kept the tone steady. When asked about Lighter’s position in the market, he kept it simple: “We’re pretty happy about our position right now,” he said, “but we’re working hard.”
For anyone watching the next chapter of crypto infrastructure, that attitude may be the real signal.
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