Wilmington tech startup Raleon announced that it’s raised $3.8 million in seed round funding.

The web3 engagement platform plans to use the capital to drive Web3 growth and expand into more traditional Web2 online spaces, Raleon CEO Nathan Snell said. The company’s $3.8 million in funding, which was announced last week, is just the latest multi-million-dollar capital fundraising effort from a Wilmington-based tech startup this year. 

In June, Ohanafy, a craft beverage management software, raised $2.8 million in capital. Fintech firm Approve announced a $3 million fundraising series around the same time.

“The $3.8 million in fundraising is really to drive additional growth,” Snell said. “The intention is to continue to grow effectively, to be able to put ourselves in a position such that we can continue to step on the gas … if we want to.”

Snell, who was a cofounder of cloud-based banking company nCino, formed Raleon in 2022 with Adam Larson, another former nCino employee. Raleon provides a Web3 engagement platform that helps brands, games and decentralized applications or dApps convert and retain users.

While the company plans to focus on growing in Web3 spaces, it also aims to expand within more traditional Web2 spaces in order to serve a broader array of customers. 

The seed round was led by Blockchange with participation from Play Ventures, Alliance DAO and Portal Ventures. 

With the funding, company officials plan to hire more employees and continue to build out its software as a service  platform. The platform includes Embedded Quests, a project that allows decentralized applications to configure unique user quests with no coding required. 

The program allows for “easy targeting of specific users through personalizing tasks backed by Web2 and Web3 data,” along with delineating actions and rewarding users for successful quest completion, according to a news release from the company.

Raleon has plans for another product.

“We’ve got a newer product area that we haven’t announced yet that we anticipate driving a pretty substantial amount of growth,” Snell said. 

Web3 is a term that refers to the concept of a digitized world that’s decentralized using blockchain technology. Some online users have opted for Web3 because it gives users – not tech companies like Microsoft or Apple – ownership of their data, leading to more data security and privacy.

In this funding series, the company’s backers were a mix of strategic investors and those who wanted to lead investment in Raleon because of their support for the company’s work and experience, Snell said. 

He attributes some of Raleon’s fundraising success to Wilmington’s growing tech scene, which includes companies such as nCino, Live Oak Bank and Apiture, among others. Snell said Raleon, for instance, didn’t face questions from investors about its decision to headquarter in the Wilmington area – a sign of the area’s increasing growth as a tech hub.

That's welcome news for Snell who's watched Wilmington's tech scene evolve in recent years.

“Since moving here, it’s been my hope to help create this kind of tech bubble or tech hub area on the coast, kind of like a Silicon Coast, if you will,” Snell said. “So to be able to start another company that’s still in Wilmington, to see other Wilmington startups forming, hopefully we can continue to build a nice vibrant and budding community.”