Investing in Pimlico
One of crypto’s core promises is self-sovereignty over digital goods and assets. Despite this promise, developers building wallets or web3 applications and experiences have long been faced with a dilemma – deciding whether to prioritize UX or decentralization.
When optimizing for UX, developers have typically leaned into custodial solutions, sacrificing self-sovereignty. Those prioritizing self-sovereignty and self-custody subsequently forced their users to manage 12 or 24-word seed phrases.
In 2019, the concept of account abstraction was introduced as the first step in a long series of solutions to enable flexible, secure self-custody. In 2021, ERC-4337 was proposed and quickly became the first Account Abstraction spec to gain real momentum, as it did not require changes to Ethereum’s consensus-layer. Among the authors of ERC-4337, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and several Ethereum core researchers, was Kristof Gazso.
When we first met Kristof Gazso, buzz around account abstraction was picking up, and companies were beginning to form with the mission of supporting smart contract wallets of the future. Inspired by his talk on Account Abstraction at ETH Dubai, and recognizing the significance of his close ties to core Ethereum developers, we quickly realized that Kristof was a world-class developer, and someone we wanted to keep a very close eye on as account abstraction became an investable category.
Months later, Kristof founded Pimlico, a product suite to enable wallet developers to easily embed account abstraction functionality. Pimlico is designed to make crypto UX simpler and easier by offering services like gas fee sponsorship, payment with ERC-20 tokens, social recovery schemes, batched transactions, spending limits, and different account access levels.
With Pimlico just a few weeks old, Kristof participated in our Spring 2023 cohort of Crypto Startup School in Los Angeles. Within weeks, we were blown away by the velocity at which Kristof and team shipped product and closed significant, early partnerships for Pimlico. By the end of Crypto Startup School, we were convinced that no one was better equipped to build the supporting infrastructure for account abstraction than Kristof.
Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve led Pimlico’s Seed round and are thrilled to partner with them as they enable web3 deliver on its self-sovereignty promises with the ease and usability of web2.
We’re also excited to work with Kristof and the Pimlico team from our new office in London. If the name wasn’t enough of a clue, Pimlico is based in London and we are excited to work with fantastic entrepreneurs in the UK ecosystem with Kristof being a great example of one.
Welcome, Pimlico!
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