Phantom

Phantom

Phantom was founded in January 2021 by CEO Brandon Millman alongside CTO Francesco Agosti and CPO Chris Kalani. The team — engineers, designers, and repeat founders — set out to build a multichain wallet that made self-custody usable for a mainstream audience, and by October of that year recorded over $1 billion in swap volume from a base of 1 million users. Early backers a16z, Variant, and Jump Capital anchored a $9 million Series A in July 2021 (per the firm). The wallet now supports spot trading, perpetuals, and prediction markets, integrated with a social layer that includes usernames and direct transfers. Phantom functions as a platform rather than a fund: revenues come from in-app swap fees, not carried interest, and the product serves retail users across Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin. A prepaid Visa debit card — issued by Lead Bank — lets users spend crypto wherever Visa is accepted, making Phantom a direct competitor to centralized exchange products while retaining its non-custodial architecture. The user base spans North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, with growth concentrated in mobile-first markets. Headcount exceeds 100, with leadership spanning product, engineering, legal, and people operations. Phantom does not report AUM because it is not a manager of external capital; its scale is measured in users and funding milestones. In January 2025, Sequoia Capital and Paradigm co-led a $150 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, with participation from a16z crypto and Variant (per the firm, January 2025). The round followed a July 2021 Series A and an undisclosed Series B, and the capital is earmarked to expand Phantom into what the company calls the world's biggest consumer finance platform. The structural differentiator is the business model. Phantom is a self-custodial wallet, not a family office or fund — it earns fees from user activity rather than managing LP capital. That means no lockups, no fund structure, and no limited partners. The Series C recapitalization gives Phantom a balance sheet to build adjacent consumer-finance products without raising a fund, a posture that avoids the regulatory constraints of a money transmitter while competing with both decentralized protocols and centralized exchanges.