“Moving from crypto to AI” became a refrain in Silicon Valley after ChatGPT launched in 2022. Opportunistic founders were looking to move from a fading hype cycle to newer, shinier technology. Vladimir Novakovski, however, has moved from AI to crypto and has attracted a who’s who of investors to back his startup Lighter, one of the fastest-growing projects in digital assets.
Lighter is both a decentralized exchange designed not to be controlled by a single entity and a blockchain. It allows users to trade perpetual futures contracts, a type of derivative that allows traders to speculate on the future prices of cryptocurrencies. It will also soon launch spot trading for tokens like Bitcoin, Novakovski said.
On Tuesday, Lighter announced it had raised $68 million in a new funding round. According to Novakovski, 40, who founded Lighter in 2022 and serves as its CEO, the fundraising was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and fintech investor Ribbit Capital. Other participants included Haun Ventures and online brokerage Robinhood, which rarely invests in venture capital.
The round valued Lighter at about $1.5 billion, according to two sources familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss private business transactions. Novakovski declined to comment on Lighter’s valuation, but said the deal was for stock warrants and tokens, or allocations of a cryptocurrency that has not yet been released.
“What we want to do is be the infrastructure layer that verifies that everything that happens in the financial area happens fairly, correctly and transparently,” Novakovski said in an interview.
From trading to AI to trading
The fundraising for Lighter comes amid a wave of buzz for crypto or perpetual “kinks.” These are derivative products that are popular in the crypto industry and allow traders to hold futures contracts that do not expire, provided they maintain the necessary margin requirement.
While the so-called criminals have been around for years, the recent rise of Hyperliquid, another decentralized exchange, has shaken up the market. With just 11 employees, Hyperliquide co-founder Jeff Yan managed to challenge centralized behemoths like Binance, which responded by closely aligning itself with its own Hyperliquide competitor: Aster.
Lighter is entering an extremely competitive market, but Novakovski has the intellectual chops to compete. “Vlad and the team he built are 85% to 90% of the reason we invested,” said Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund. Fortune.
After Novakovski immigrated to the United States from Russia as a child, he earned a spot on the U.S. national teams for the International Computer Science and Physics Olympiad. At the age of 16, he went to Harvard, graduated early and, at just 18, began working for the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. (Citadel CEO Ken Griffin personally recruited him, Novakovski said.)
Novakovski then had a nearly 15-year career in various companies as an engineer and trader before becoming a founder himself. In 2017, he created a startup with Scott Wu, with whom Novakovski previously worked at the investment company Addepar; and Hayley Leibson, whom Novakovski met among technicians in San Francisco. They founded Lunchclub, an AI-powered social networking platform.
The trio raised around $30 million and, early in the pandemic, saw their product attract many single users looking to meet new people. But in 2022, growth has plateaued. “We had three paths: try to make it something profitable but small, try to find a way to move on from what it was like to like TikTok or Snapchat, which didn’t seem particularly viable,” Novakovski said. “The third way: move on to something else that we were really passionate about. »
Wu left Lunchclub to found AI coding startup Cognition, which has since reached a valuation of $10.2 billion, and Leibson founded another AI startup that she sold in 2024. Novakovski decided to return to her roots as a trader.
He pivoted Lunchclub to Lighter, retained 80% of the team and raised a new pool of capital: $21 million in a first-of-its-kind 2024 funding round led by Haun Ventures and Craft Ventures. Other participants included Dragonfly and Robot Ventures. This, combined with Lighter’s latest funding round, brings the amount Lighter has raised so far to almost $90 million.
After two years of development and testing, it launched Lighter in January. Unlike Hyperliquid, which runs on its own layer 1 blockchain, Lighter runs on its own layer 2 on Ethereum, which Novakovski mentioned as a key differentiator between the two competing products.
Lighter’s blockchain has quickly become one of the largest layer 2 blockchains on Ethereum in terms of total volume locked or total amount of funds on a blockchain, according to data from crypto analytics site L2BEAT. And his business is already profitable, Novakovski said. “We’re pretty happy with where we are right now,” he added, when asked how his product compared to Hyperliquid, “but we’re working hard.”
Updated November 12, 2025: Added that Hayley Leibson was also a co-founder of Lunchclub.
