Cody McGrath 
The money round That Slide raised was led by Polychain Capital and Framework Ventures.
Slide, a startup that makes user experience infrastructure for decentralized applications (dapps), has raised $12.3 million in seed funding. Polychain Capital and Framework Ventures, two crypto-focused investment firms, led the round. With the money, Slide will be able to keep hiring more people, build out its infrastructure, and get its product to dapps.
When a new user wants to use a Web3 app, they often have to find third-party places to buy crypto and store it so they can use it in the app. Slide is an all-in-one tool that lets users stay inside the app. It has features like the ability to buy non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a credit card and a wallet that can be set up with an email address instead of a browser extension.
Teymour Farman-Farmaian, CEO and co-founder of Slide, said in an interview, “We’re making it possible for any user, no matter what their background or experience, to use Web3.” “Right now, it’s really hard for the average user to use decentralized apps, and it’s hard for the incremental decentralized app to get any kind of exposure to regular users. Both sides have trouble getting in touch with each other.”
From New York Farman-Farmaian, who used to be the product lead at crypto exchange Coinbase, and Sam Hatem, who used to work as a blockchain developer at event-betting platform Polymarket, started Slide at the beginning of this year. Slide came out of stealth mode at the same time as the funding round, but only with a small group of partners. Farman-Farmaian said that the company plans to have a full, open launch by the end of the year.
Coinbase’s venture capital arm, Circle, which makes USDC, and Outlander Ventures, an investment firm, also took part in the funding round. Among the individual investors were the former Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, the partner at Dragonfly Capital, Ani Pai, and the CEO of Polymarket, Shayne Coplan.
In April, Framework Ventures, the main investor, started a fund with $400 million to support Web3 gaming and decentralized finance.
In an email, Framework Ventures investor Rajiv Patel-O’Connor said, “Under the right conditions, we think billions of people could come on-chain over the next decade, and we think UX (user experience) infrastructure projects like Slide will play a key role in this migration.”