SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 23, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Huma, a leading income-backed DeFi protocol, today announced the close of an $8.3 million seed round led by Race Capital and Distributed Global with participation from ParaFi Capital, Circle Ventures, Folius Ventures, Robot Ventures and more. The company’s first product launch is an on-chain factoring market, and they plan to use the funds to continue developing the platform and expanding its reach into new markets.
Huma was the winner of the 2022 Decentralized Finance track during ETHDenver, a hackathon known for incubating numerous noteworthy projects.
Huma was founded by Erbil Karaman, Richard Liu, Ji Peng and Lei Du who have extensive experience working together in Google, Meta, Lyft, Microsoft, Earnin, and OpenDoor. Before starting Huma, 3 of the co-founders were executives at Earnin, one of the most successful fintech startups in the U.S., providing financial wellness solutions to millions of Americans trying to make ends meet.
Today, the crypto industry is mainly built for speculators and is unable to support most real world use cases and thus has limited reach. The proven method to serve a larger set of use cases and audience is to underwrite based on cash flow instead of what crypto assets they hold. Huma is building the missing infrastructure components that enable income-backed decentralized financial services. Huma’s initial launch partners include global financial technology firm Circle, and blockchain payment networks Request Network and Superfluid that are enabling borrowing against invoices and users’ incomes.
“Equal access to financial opportunity is a fundamental right for humanity. There’s still a lot of progress to be made to make this a reality,” said Erbil Karaman, co-founder and CEO at Huma Finance. “My team and I have a very strong conviction that blockchain-based financial technologies will replace the archaic and highly centralized financial systems we have today. This transition makes instant credit markets possible with a much greater level of accessibility and capital efficiency.”
“Decentralized finance leverages smart contracts to automate lending and settle transactions in seconds with full traceability. This is simply magic. The impact to humanity will be massive as we bring these technologies closer to serving real world needs of the 99%,” said Richard Liu, co-founder and CTO at Huma Finance.
“Our mission at Request is to bring interoperability to invoicing and have apps interact with each other in a permissionless way. For example, a user could issue an invoice in Request Finance and secure immediate financing through Huma. That’s why we are excited to be working with Huma Finance, and it brings closer to our vision of building an ecosystem of open financial apps. This financing use case is a first step towards the enablement of a decentralized and P2P invoice financing machine,” said Christophe Lassuyt, President at Request Foundation.
"We're excited to be working with the entire Huma Finance team," said Edith Yeung, General Partner at Race Capital. "Income is the most critical input in traditional lending, but there is no decentralized finance lending protocol today that understands income portfolios of businesses or people. Huma Finance will start with the global factoring services market, which alone was valued at $3.5 Trillion in 2022.”
About Huma Finance
Huma is a leading income-backed DeFi lending protocol for people and businesses around the world. We empower our partners and communities by providing a decentralized, transparent, and accessible financial infrastructure and a thriving ecosystem. https://huma.finance/
About Race Capital
Race Capital is an early-stage venture fund focused on investing in exceptional founders who are building market-transforming companies in the data, enterprise, infrastructure, and fintech sectors. Our team are seed investors in Databricks, Solana, Agora.io, Zeet, and many other great companies. For more information, visit https://race.capital/.
About Distributed Global
Distributed Global is an early-stage investment firm focused on the blockchain and digital asset ecosystem. https://distributedglobal.com/
