Umia raised $6.11 million through a seven-day auction of its UMIA governance token, pricing the project at an $18 million fully diluted valuation and distributing 34.6% of supply to public bidders.

The sale ran on Coinbase's Base network from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2 and sold 17.3 million UMIA tokens with no lockup. All units were liquid at launch. Co-founder and CEO Francesco Mosterts told The Block the platform deliberately sold a large share of supply to give early backers a meaningful stake and avoid a small float followed by large future unlocks.

UMIA traded near $0.68 on CoinGecko at the time of reporting, lifting its fully diluted valuation to roughly $34 million.

Who bought in?

Institutional investors contributed about 45% of the proceeds, with ten funds participating. Named participants include Galaxy Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Draper Associates, RenGen, Alpha EV, Maven 11 and Eon Capital. Nearly 700 individual bidders took part in the remainder.

Mosterts stressed that funds received the same terms as retail bidders and no discounts. None secured board seats, observer rights or advisory roles, a structure that diverges from standard venture practice.

The raise lands in a market where crypto investors have gravitated toward equity deals and revenue-linked tokens rather than speculative governance assets. Competing launch infrastructure is also emerging: GSR, Ink Foundation and several legal and audit firms recently launched Charter Foundation to compress token issuance costs.

How does Umia's model differ?

Mosterts said Umia wraps each project's intellectual property, operating team and treasury in a single legal entity tied to the token, rather than fragmenting governance across a company, foundation and DAO. Umia charges a 0.5% fee on spot trades across the decentralized exchange pools it manages and 1% on decision-market trades.

Twenty percent of the UMIA auction proceeds seeded a protocol-owned UMIA-USDC liquidity pool on Uniswap v4 at the closing price; the remainder went to treasury. Smart contracts release $120,000 each month for development, and any larger outlay must clear a UMIA decision market.

Decision markets replace conventional token voting. Traders take positions on how the token price should perform under competing proposals, and the option with the highest time-weighted average price can execute onchain. Mosterts acknowledged the trade-off: token-holder control over board-level decisions can dilute founder authority and pull teams toward short-term price action. He said those risks are preferable to standard token voting, which he views as ineffective, or equity financing that grants board seats to venture firms with their own conflicts.

What is shipping on Umia?

Umia's curation committee has cleared three external projects for launch on the platform. The first, Slop.cash, comes from Shaw, the developer behind ai16z, now rebranded as ElizaOS. Mosterts said Slop.cash should go live later in the fourth quarter. Two additional projects will be announced in the coming weeks.

More than 200 applications have arrived from teams in AI infrastructure, AI applications, decentralized finance, tokenized funds, real-world assets and fintech, according to Mosterts. Projects may deploy on any EVM-compatible chain. Internal due diligence precedes a presentation to a curation committee that includes Maven 11, RenGen and analytics firm 01resolved.

Umia employs seven people and is recruiting business development staff to expand the review pipeline. Chainbound, an Ethereum research and development firm that has worked with Flashbots and the Ethereum Foundation, incubated the platform. Mosterts previously worked at Point72, while co-founder and CTO Nicolas Racchi built DeFi protocols and Ethereum infrastructure.

The auction used Umia's fork of Uniswap's Continuous Clearing Auction, with a $2 million minimum target and a $0.36 maximum token price. Mosterts said the structure included eligibility checks and technical safeguards against bot and maximal-extractable-value activity.

What to watch

The Slop.cash launch in the coming weeks will test whether Umia's single-wrapper legal structure and decision-market governance can sustain operations without founder drift. Mosterts said the company will disclose the second and third external launches before year-end.