The pitch sounds almost too good to be true: a browser that trades crypto for you, analyzing markets and executing transactions while you're unconscious. Yet that's precisely what Donut Labs is building—and investors are buying in.
On November 3, the New York startup closed a $15 million seed round, bringing its total haul to $22 million in just six months. The backers read like a who's-who of crypto-adjacent venture: BITKRAFT, HongShan (the fund formerly known as Sequoia China), Makers Fund, Sky9 Capital, Altos Ventures, and Hack VC. Angels from the Solana, Sui, and Monad ecosystems joined the round too.
More than 160,000 traders have already joined the waitlist. Whether that signals genuine demand or simply crypto's perpetual appetite for the next shiny thing remains unclear.
A Browser With Its Own Investment Thesis
Chris Zhu, Donut's CEO, describes the product as "your personal AI quant inside a browser." It's an ambitious framing. The software is designed to scan markets autonomously, calculate position sizes, generate trading strategies, and execute trades across decentralized exchanges—all without requiring constant human babysitting.
The interface lives across multiple surfaces: a Chrome extension, a standalone web app, a mobile version, and eventually a full Chromium-based browser. Beneath the user-facing layer, Donut employs what the company calls "multi-model orchestration"—essentially routing tasks between different AI models depending on what needs doing. A real-time feedback loop validates decisions, while on-chain data grounds the analysis in actual market activity rather than hallucination.
Security, naturally, is the elephant in any room where AI agents handle money. Donut has partnered with Turnkey for key management and claims to separate wallet backends so its AI never touches user balances directly. Different authorization levels dictate which actions the software can take without a human signing off.
That last detail matters more than it might sound. The difference between an AI that suggests trades and one that executes them is the difference between a calculator and a self-driving car.
The Team: Gaming Pivots and AI Pedigrees
Zhu isn't new to raising venture capital in crypto. He previously founded Mirror World Labs, which built Sonic—a gaming-focused layer-2 on Solana that pulled in $12 million from BITKRAFT back in June 2024. Before his founder arc, he spent time at ByteDance.
The Donut roster includes engineers who've done stints at Meta AI, TikTok AI, and Tencent AI. Tim Fan, formerly at Meta AI and a Carnegie Mellon alum, serves as Chief Scientist. NYU Stern professor Xi Chen sits on the advisory board, lending a touch of academic credibility.
It's the kind of team that looks good in a pitch deck. Whether they can nail the product-market fit for autonomous trading—a use case that requires both technical sophistication and user trust—is another question entirely.
Betting on the Agentic Browser Moment
Donut isn't pioneering new conceptual territory. Decrypt reported that both OpenAI and Perplexity have explored autonomous browser agents, though neither company has confirmed anything publicly. In the crypto-native browser space, Opera and Brave have already shipped Web3-integrated products with built-in wallets. What they haven't done—at least not yet—is market autonomous trading capabilities.
The company's timing argument hinges on volume. On-chain perpetuals trading reportedly crossed $1 trillion in monthly volume this past September. Daily DEX spot volume, according to data Donut cited in its announcement, hovers around $20 billion. If those numbers hold, there's theoretically room for a product that makes that liquidity more accessible.
But there's a trust problem baked into the premise. Traders, especially those who've survived a few crypto winters, tend toward paranoia about who—or what—controls their capital. Convincing them to let an AI agent execute trades without approval for every transaction? That's a tougher sell than the fundraising numbers might suggest.
What Comes Next
Donut raised its $7 million pre-seed back in May, co-led by HongShan, BITKRAFT, and Hack VC. That earlier round pulled in Sky9 Ventures, Matrix Partners, Makers Fund, Altos, Orthogonal Ventures, Vessel Ventures, and SonicSVM—a syndicate that's now doubled down.
The fresh capital will fund the actual shipping of Donut's browser products and the conversion of its 160,000-person waitlist into paying users. That conversion rate will tell the real story. A waitlist is cheap; active users who trust your AI with their portfolios are not.
For now, Donut remains in that liminal startup space where the vision is clear but the execution is still theoretical. The technology exists. The market might exist. Whether the two can meet in the middle—and whether traders will actually trust a browser to trade for them—is the $22 million question.
