Arch Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) startup, has acquired $5 million in seed round funding in an effort to achieve its goal of becoming the “BlackRock of web3.”

As The Block reported, this new seed round of funding will be used to tokenize a wide range of decentralized financial indices and to turn the platform into a decentralized asset management protocol.

According to the company statement, the fundraiser is co-led by Digital Currency Group and SoftBank spin-off Upload Ventures. Other investors include the venture arm of Latin American blockchain firm Ripio, TechStars and GBV.

Andres Fleischer, Managing Partner of Ripio Ventures, stated that the solution provided by Arch Finance is compelling as it brings something complex but makes it easy for everyone to do it.

Arch is a portfolio management startup that aims to make DeFi investing accessible to the public.

Christopher Storaker, co-founder and CEO of Arch, in an interview with The Block, stated that “diversification is the only free lunch in finance” and wants to simplify it for the web3 ecosystem.

Storaker said that its decentralized asset management protocol, Arch Finance, creates well-diversified tokenized investment portfolios that people will be able to purchase through smart contracts and self-custody.

When asked why investors should choose Arch over buying a crypto exchange-traded product (ETP) from a player like BlackRock or 21Shares, Storaker responded: “Arch will take a different approach by going beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum to give investors exposure to the cutting edge of what’s happening on web3.”

“When we say ‘BlackRock of web3,’ we really want to be on par on the methodology side of what they do and what people expect from passive products,” Storaker said.

Notably, Arch Finance previously raised a pre-seed round and went through the TechStars accelerator program.

The portfolio management platform will offer two index tokens, including the Arch blockchain token. These index tokens would be used to track the largest blockchains, and the Arch Ethereum Web3 token will track native tokens from notable protocols like Uniswap and Chainlink.

Speaking of seed rounds, in June, Astaria, an NFT lending platform that unlocks instant liquidity, raised a total of $8 million in a seed round from major venture capital and angel investors to enhance the liquidity of NFT loans.

With this funding round, even in the midst of a bear market, the saying “bear markets are for building” seems to have been justified.

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