Intensity Labs, the developer of the "intent-centric" DeFi protocol Shogun, has raised $6.9 million in a seed funding round.

Polychain Capital and DAO5 co-led the round, with Arrington Capital, Arthur Hayes' family office Maelstrom and Build-a-Bera participating, Intensity Labs said Wednesday. Angel investors, including Cobie, Ansem, Ser Shokunin and Meltem Demirors, also joined the round. 

Intensity Labs began raising money for this round in January of this year, and it was "oversubscribed" by mid-February, co-founder Rahul Patel told The Block. The project initially planned to raise $5 million, but due to "high demand, we did the meme number of $6.9 million," Patel said.

The funding round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, Patel said, bringing Shogun's fully diluted token valuation to $69 million.

Shogun was previously incubated by Binance Labs. In March of this year, the crypto exchange's venture capital and incubation arm invested in Shogun, alongside six other startups, as part of its incubation season 6 program, as The Block reported at the time.

What is Shogun?

Shogun is an intent-centric DeFi protocol. Its "intent" or specific goal is to maximize trader extractable value (TEV), the potential maximum profit that traders can extract with several trading strategies.

"Shogun maximizes TEV by proactively routing liquidity through a hybrid model of intent-based fulfillment through market makers and centralized exchanges, combined with on-chain fulfillment for long-tail assets through decentralized exchanges and passive liquidity vaults," Intensity Labs said.

Shogun will provide users with one platform on which they will have access to every token on every blockchain, Brandon Comer, Intensity's other co-founder, told The Block. "You won't need different wallets or accounts for different chains; it's all one interface," Comer said. "They can trade through a plethora of options: our trading bot, desktop/mobile UI, as well as our trading widgets hosted on other apps."

Comer said Shogun is building a platform like fintech giant Plaid but for web3. "If you think of what Plaid did in fintech by linking all banks together and enabling greater interactivity with your personal finances, we're building this for web3 (web3-as-a-service). Any non-crypto company will be able to add DeFi to their apps with little to no effort," he said.

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Besides Plaid, Comer also gave an example of Solana-based trading aggregator Jupiter, saying how it connected all available Solana decentralized exchange routes in one convenient user experience; Shogun will let any app deploy its own Jupiter (both cross-chain and selected chains by the app).

"Multiple ecosystems have expressed an interest in this functionality," Comer said. "The first is Boopiter, a meme-ified version of Jupiter dedicated to the Berachain ecosystem. The Cosmos ecosystem will be hosting one through their Interchain Info service. We're also in talks with other major ecosystems within EVM L2s, MoveVM, and more," he added. 

Shogun launch and token

The Shogun protocol will be released in phases, starting with its on-chain routing tool in the second quarter of this year. The protocol will also have its own token with the ticker GUN, Patel said.

Shogun is also building multiple interfaces for Berachain, the Cosmos ecosystem, and Intensity Labs' own cross-chain Telegram trading bot, Shogun Oakmont, which will enable traders to trade "any asset on any chain with any token," Patel said.

Ten people currently work for Intensity Labs, and Patel plans to hire more in the engineering department to help expand Shogun's supported networks.

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