Umia raises $6M through Base token auction joined by Galaxy, DCG and Draper

Umia, a platform for launching and governing token-native projects, said on Oct. 5 it raised $6 million by auctioning its own UMIA token on Base. Ten funds and nearly 700 individual bidders took part in the seven-day sale, with Galaxy Ventures, DCG and Draper Associates among the funds, in the company announcement.

The sale ran from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2 and opened with a three-day early round for vetted funds and zkTLS-verified community members. The public round hit its cap seven minutes after opening on Aug. 29, and the sale closed at more than three times its $2 million minimum, that notice says.

Every bidder faced the same terms. Galaxy Ventures, DCG, Draper Associates, RenGen, Alpha EV, Maven 11 and Eon Capital bid with no discounts, on identical terms to each individual participant, the release says.

Crypto Briefing, in Oct. 5 coverage, put the final figure at about $6.11 million. The outlet said Umia sold 17.3 million tokens, described as 34.6 percent of a 40 million launch supply, at a clearing price of $0.36.

That price set the auction valuation at $18 million fully diluted. Fully diluted value multiplies the current price by every token that will ever exist, as if the whole supply already circulated, that report explains.

Trading repriced the project fast. UMIA opened around $0.68, implying a fully diluted value near $34 million to $40 million and paper gains close to 90 percent for auction buyers, Crypto Briefing noted in the same piece.

Tokens carried no lockup. Every token sold was liquid at the generation event, while Umia dedicates about 20 percent of proceeds to a protocol-owned liquidity pool rather than renting liquidity from outside market makers, in that account.

The raise doubles as a product demo. Umia puts its own IP, operating team and treasury inside one legal wrapper, with money raised sitting in a non-custodial treasury rather than a team wallet, the announcement says.

Board-level decisions run through decision markets. Each proposal opens a conditional market per option, participants trade on each option's expected impact, and the market favorite gets executed, a system known as futarchy. The first Umia decision market went live Sept. 17, asking traders how to deploy $4.77 million of treasury USDC into Base lending protocols, with three strategies competing against doing nothing, in the same post.

That first vote already resolved. The winning strategy, allocating to Aave and Steakhouse, has been executed, the statement says.

Co-founder Francesco Mosterts put the problem in plain terms: "Serious teams have never had a way to launch a token that is actually tied to the project behind it, so we put our own token through our system first," he said. "The result is a framework we believe will change how projects are funded, launched and governed." The quotes come from the company release.

James Kibbie, an investor at Galaxy Ventures, said onchain fundraising usually forces a choice between a fair mechanism and a credible structure. He said the Umia auction pairs the two, with a clearing process that treats funds and individuals alike plus a legal and treasury setup that gives the token a defined link to the project, in that announcement.

The team comes from Ethereum infrastructure work. Umia is built by the group behind Chainbound, an Ethereum research lab with more than four years of EVM infrastructure design including work with Flashbots and the Ethereum Foundation. Mosterts previously worked at Point72, co-founder and CTO Nicolas Racchi previously built DeFi protocols and Ethereum infrastructure, and Umia is incubated by Chainbound, the notice says.

The shared legal piece uses a Cayman structure that projects on the platform can use instead of assembling their own wrapper from scratch. That description comes from Crypto Briefing write-up of the platform design.

First external projects are expected to launch through Umia in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to onboarding and legal review. Timelines are indicative and may change, the company says.