UAE’s Further Ventures pours $19M in hybrid DEX GRVT

UAE sovereign wealth fund backed, investment firm Further Ventures, has co-led a $19 million Series A funding round in Grvt, a decentralized exchange for onchain financial privacy powered by zero knowledge technology.

The Series A round was led by both ZKsync, and Further Ventures both of whom had either partnered or invested in earlier in Grvt. Also other investors included Eigen Cloud (formerly EigenLayer), a verifiable cloud platform that lets developers build any application; and 500 Global (formerly 500 Startups), a venture capital firm with $2.3B in AUM investing in founders with a global outlook building fast-growing startups.

In January 2025, Further Ventures, had invested $5 million in GRVT, noting that the investment would be utilized to drive GRVT’s Middle East expansion and license progress.

As per the press release, the investment strengthens Grvt’s pioneering position as the global blueprint for the future of finance, accelerating its mission to disrupt the fragmented onchain finance ecosystem by addressing longstanding industry challenges, including privacy vulnerabilities, security, scalability and accessibility.

Faisal Al Hammadi, Managing Partner, Further Ventures, noted that the firm was committed to backing the next generation of financial infrastructure from Abu Dhabi to the world. He emphasized that Grvt’s application of zero-knowledge proofs is reflective of how cutting edge cryptography can underpin markets at institutional scale.

In August, Ethereum’s onchain volume reached over $320 billion, its highest level since mid-2021. Research also projects the DeFi sector to surge from $32.36 billion in 2025 to over $1.5 trillion by 2034.

Grvt is working to solve issues faced by decentralized platforms, such as the issues of whale hunting, maximum extractable value attacks, and others which lead to billion of dollars in losses annually.

Grvt will use $19 million to fast track product development

The funds raised will be used to fast track product development, engineering, including cross exchange vaults, options markets, and RWA integrations to consolidated the currently fragmented onchain financial landscape.

As for the remaining funds, they will be used to support community initiatives and talent acquisition to drive global expansion.

Hong Yea, co-founder and CEO at Grvt, stated that previously onchain finance had been held back by privacy gaps that expose users to exploitation. He added, “By building a privacy-driven, scalable, and trustless DEX that offers a wide array of structured products, Grvt exemplifies how ZK-powered solutions will become the new normal for everyone, realizing the vision of an open and secure onchain finance world.”

Alex Gluchoski, co-founder and CEO at Matter Labs, commented: “We believe ZK is the ‘HTTPS moment’ for crypto. Just as HTTPS took the internet mainstream by adding a layer of trust and privacy, ZK will do the same for Web3. Grvt is uniquely positioned to be the most liquid and impactful application layer to help realize this vision, their dedication and progress excellently demonstrates how ZK can bring onchain finance to mainstream.”

Grvt’s ZKsync technology ensures privacy, security and scalability

Grvt’s utilization of ZKsync allows it to offer privacy as it runs on ZKsync Validium L2 blockchain that validates L2 state without publishing it, thereby ensuring privacy, an issue that has long plagued most DeFi protocols.

It also ensures Ethereum-level Security. With ZK proofs, L2 transactions inherit Ethereum-level security. Every batch of transactions is verified directly on Ethereum, this means that even though transactions are processed off-chain for speed and low cost, their validity is mathematically guaranteed. If any transaction were invalid, the proof would fail and Ethereum would reject it.

Finally in terms of scalability, the ZKsync Stack improves scalability by operating as a L2 solution, enabling the processing of significantly more transactions than Ethereum’s base layer while making transactions cheaper by handling them off-chain in bulk.

UAE Further Ventures, backed by sovereign wealth fund ADQ has a $200 million fund that has already been allocated to investments in the digital assets, fintech and technology ecosystem.

They have invested in digital asset custodian Zodia, as well as digital asset insurer Soter, digital asset infrastructure provider Fuze and earlier this year it also led a $16 million investment Series A round in French digital asset wallet and custodian developer, DFNS

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