Intent-Driven DeFi Protocol Shogun Raises Seed Round with Token Valuation of $69 Million

Intensity Labs, developer of “intent-driven” DeFi protocol Shogun, has raised $6.9 million in a seed funding round.

Intensity Labs said Wednesday that Polychain Capital and DAO5 co-led the round, along with Arrington Capital, Arthur Hayes’ family company Maelstrom, and Build-a-Bera. Angel investors including Cobie, Ansem, Ser Shokunin and Meltem Demirors also participated in the round.

Intensity Labs began raising funding for this round in January of this year and was “oversubscribed” by mid-February, co-founder Rahul Patel told The Block. The project initially planned to raise $5 million, but “due to high demand, we ended up raising $6.9 million,” Patel said.

Patel said the funding round consisted of Simple Contracts for Future Assets (SAFE) along with token warrants, bringing Shogun’s fully diluted token value to $69 million.

Shogun was previously incubated at Binance Labs. As The Block reported at the time, in March of this year, the cryptocurrency exchange’s venture capital and incubation arm invested in Shogun along with six other startups as part of its Incubation Season 6 program.

What is a Shogun?

Shogun is an intent-driven DeFi protocol. The “intent” or specific goal is to maximize Trader Extractable Value (TEV), which is the maximum profit potential a trader can extract from multiple trading strategies.

“Shogun maximizes TEV by proactively routing liquidity through a hybrid model of intent-based execution through market makers and centralized exchanges, and combining on-chain execution for long-tail assets through decentralized exchanges and passive liquidity vaults,” Intensity Labs said. “I do,” he said.

Shogun will provide users with a single platform to access all tokens on all blockchains, Patel said. “You don’t need different wallets or accounts for different chains. It’s all one interface,” he said. “They can trade through a variety of options, including our trading bot, desktop/mobile UI, and trading widgets hosted in other apps.”

Patel said Shogun is building a platform like fintech giant Plaid for web3. “If you think about how Plaid connected all the banks in the fintech space and enabled greater interaction with personal finance, we are building this for web3 (web3-as-a-service), not cryptocurrency. “Any company can add DeFi to their app without much effort,” he said.

In addition to Plaid, Patel gave the example of Jupiter, a Solana-based trading integration service, to explain how it connects all available Solana decentralized exchange paths into one convenient user experience. Shogun allows any app to deploy its own Jupiter (both cross-chain and on the chain chosen by the app).

“Multiple ecosystems have expressed interest in this feature,” Patel said. “The first is Booopiter, a meme version of Jupiter dedicated to the Berachain ecosystem. The Cosmos ecosystem will host one through the Interchain Info service. We are also in talks with other major ecosystems such as EVM L2, MoveVM, etc.,” He added:

Shogun Launch and Tokens

The Shogun protocol will be rolled out in stages, starting with on-chain routing tools in the second quarter of this year. The protocol will also have its own token with the GUN ticker, Patel said.

Shogun is also building multiple interfaces for the Cosmos ecosystem, Berachain, and Intensity Labs’ own cross-chain Telegram trading bot, Shogun Oakmont. This allows traders to trade “any asset, any token, on any chain.”

Ten people currently work at Intensity Labs, and Patel plans to hire more staff in the engineering department to help expand Shogun’s support network.

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