In August 2021 a Toronto crypto company announced a C$63m round, and a surprising number of famous names in digital assets were on the cap table.
Figment was founded in 2018 by Lorien Gabel, Andrew Cronk and Ben Chan, and the public record says little about their lives before it. What is on the record is the idea. Newer blockchains work by proof of stake: holders lock up their coins to help secure the network and earn rewards. That sounds easy until you realise it requires running servers around the clock, with real penalties for mistakes. Most large holders would rather pay someone else to do it.
It also placed itself in the unglamorous layer: not a coin, not an exchange, but the plumbing in between.
Figment became that someone. It offered staking, middleware and application-layer tools to token holders and developers, and in October 2020 it raised a C$2.5m seed round to build out. Ten months later it closed a C$63m Series B, about US$50m, co-led by Senator Investment Group and Liberty City Ventures, with Galaxy Digital, Anchorage, Bonfire Ventures, GSR and 40 North taking part. Bloomberg reported the valuation at US$500m. The company had 75 employees and said it wanted to expand across the whole Web3 stack.
The timing was either lucky or sharp. Staking was moving from a hobby for early adopters to an infrastructure service institutions wanted, and Figment had been selling that service for three years. It also placed itself in the unglamorous layer: not a coin, not an exchange, but the plumbing in between.
That position has costs. Staking revenue rises and falls with token prices, so the business lives inside crypto's cycles. Rivals include exchanges that bundle staking and protocols that offer it with no middleman. Aggregators disagree on how much Figment has raised, with estimates ranging from about US$52m to well over US$100m, and the company has not published detailed financials. In October 2025, Preqin recorded new venture funding from C1 Secondaries Fund, a sign that investors still wanted exposure.
Figment now works from Toronto, with offices in New York and Warsaw. The company's story is deliberately low on personality; its founders let the product speak.
For first-time founders the point is clear enough. In a gold rush, the people selling reliable tools tend to outlast those chasing the coin of the day, but only if they stay alive through the quiet years in between.