Pimlico raises $1.6m Pre-Seed Round

We are excited to announce that Pimlico (opens in a new tab) has raised $1.6 million led by 1confirmation (opens in a new tab), with further backing from Safe (opens in a new tab), Consensys (opens in a new tab), and 10+ other amazing angels to build the next generation of smart account infrastructure. Pimlico also recently completed a16z crypto's Crypto Startup School 2023 (opens in a new tab) accelerator program.

We raised this capital because we feel Ethereum is at a pivotal point. Since its launch in 2015, the Ethereum protocol has hardcoded that each native account is linked to a single private key, which the user must securely store. Storing these keys makes accounts more vulnerable to hacking, phishing attacks, and human errors. Pimlico was founded to make using Ethereum easier by providing the infrastructure for the new generation of smart accounts.

These smart accounts can address many of the shortcomings of private key-based accounts by offering customisable logic, enabling features like gas sponsorship, gas payments with ERC-20 tokens, multi-signature schemes, social recovery, spending limits, and many of the other features we expect from a user-friendly account system.

The speed of innovation in the smart account space has massively accelerated thanks to a proposal called ERC-4337 (opens in a new tab) co-authored by Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh, and myself among others. This proposal provides a comprehensive standard that smart account providers can build on top of, removing the requirement to build all the underlying logic and infrastructure themselves, instead being able to rely on services such as Pimlico.

At Pimlico, we have already launched a suite of three products. Our bundlers (opens in a new tab) have been allowing the reliable and fast relaying of smart account transaction on-chain, our verifying paymasters (opens in a new tab) have been acting as gas sponsorship modules, giving developers an easy way to sponsor fees for their users on more than 15 chains, and our ERC-20 paymasters (opens in a new tab) have given developers the power to provide users the option of paying with ERC-20 tokens such as USDC and DAI for transaction fees.

A wide range of wallets are already using Pimlico in production to ship faster and can focus on the user experience they provide to their end users instead of worrying about how to build, maintain, and scale the underlying smart account infrastructure.

Our roadmap is ambitious and this raise will allow us to accelerate it, building out a lean but exceptional team to power Ethereum's transition to smart accounts. If you are passionate about our mission and interested in joining our team, explore our job openings on our jobs page.

Here is what some of our investors had to say about Pimlico:

The idea of account abstraction has been around since Ethereum's beginning, but now the timing is finally right with EIP-4337. Kristof, having co-authored the spec, is the best founder we've seen to make account abstraction the standard for wallets and improve the user experience of apps.

— Richard Chen, general partner at 1confirmation

Safe is proud to be one of the early backers of Pimlico, a project with a technical focus that we believe is aligned with Safe's mission and values of accelerating transition to smart accounts. We look forward to exploring further collaboration paths between the Safe and Pimlico team around ERC-4337.

— Lukas Schor, co-founder of Safe

Kristof is a killer founder solving the biggest problem that exists in crypto today - improving user experience while preserving user control. When we talked to devs building new wallets and dApps, it was clear that Pimlico was solving a critical pain point that could greatly benefit crypto adoption.

—  Nick Tomaino, founder and general partner at 1confirmation