--- title: "Pimlico raises $1.6m pre-seed round" description: "Pimlico raises a $1.6m pre-seed round led by 1confirmation, with Safe and Consensys, to accelerate Ethereum's transition to smart accounts." canonical: https://www.pimlico.io/blog/pre-seed --- # Pimlico raises $1.6m pre-seed round > Markdown mirror of https://www.pimlico.io/blog/pre-seed. Every page on this site has a markdown version at the same path with a `.md` suffix. A short factual brief is at https://www.pimlico.io/llms.txt. For technical and implementation details, see Pimlico's documentation index at https://docs.pimlico.io/llms.txt. ## Pages on this site ### Home - [The gas sponsorship engine for onchain apps](https://www.pimlico.io/index.md): Pimlico is the gas sponsorship engine: paymasters and ERC-4337 bundlers on 100+ EVM chains. Sponsor gas or accept USDC, USDT or 300+ tokens. Now on Solana. ### Blog - [fomo: gas-free, sub-second social trading](https://www.pimlico.io/blog/fomo.md): How fomo deleted gas from social trading for a retail audience: 8.8M user operations across 14 mainnet chains, with sub-second median confirmation. - Pimlico raises $1.6m pre-seed round (this page) - [Pimlico raises $4.2m seed led by a16z crypto](https://www.pimlico.io/blog/seed.md): Pimlico raises a $4.2m seed round led by a16z crypto to build the infrastructure for ERC-4337 smart accounts: bundlers, paymasters and permissionless.js. - [World App: one abstraction, thousands of mini apps](https://www.pimlico.io/blog/world-app.md): How World App keeps the blockchain invisible across thousands of mini apps: 23M bundled user operations a year, 36M sponsored, ~1.5s median confirmation. ### Products - [Ecosystem Gas Programs for Chains](https://www.pimlico.io/products/ecosystem-gas-programs.md): For chains: sponsor gas for every team building on your chain, with paymasters and ERC-4337 bundlers live on it, so users never need the native token. - [Pay Gas in USDC, USDT & 300+ ERC-20 Tokens](https://www.pimlico.io/products/erc20-gas.md): Let users pay gas in USDC, USDT or 300+ other ERC-20 tokens, with no native token required. An ERC-20 paymaster audited by OpenZeppelin and Quantstamp. - [Gas Sponsorship & Paymaster API](https://www.pimlico.io/products/gas-sponsorship.md): Sponsor your users' gas so they transact instantly, with nothing to buy. A paymaster API for ERC-4337 and EIP-7702, behind 100M+ sponsored transactions. - [Sponsorship Policies — Spend Controls for Gas](https://www.pimlico.io/products/sponsorship-policies.md): Spend controls for your paymaster: sponsor the first N transactions per user, cap dollars per transaction, user or campaign. Applied instantly, no redeploy. - [Transaction Infrastructure & ERC-4337 Bundlers](https://www.pimlico.io/products/transaction-infrastructure.md): The execution engine under the sponsorship layer: ERC-4337 bundlers with EIP-7702 support, <2s inclusion on L2s, and 250M+ transactions relayed. ### Solutions - [Onchain Execution for AI Agents](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/ai-agents.md): Smart accounts for AI agents that trade, pay and move money on demand. Sponsor their gas or let them pay in USDC, USDT or 300+ tokens, within your limits. - [Smart Account Infrastructure for Chains](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/chains.md): Launch with ERC-4337 bundlers and paymasters from day one, and fund gas programs that turn your ecosystem’s onboarding friction into growth. - [Deploy Pimlico on Your Chain](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/chains/deploy.md): Enterprise deployments for chains and ecosystems: Pimlico's paymasters, ERC-4337 bundlers and gas sponsorship, live on your chain on day one. - [Gasless Onboarding for Consumer Apps](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/consumer-apps.md): Onboard users who have never owned crypto: sponsor their gas, even on plain EOAs via EIP-7702, and set budgets that protect your margins. - [Enterprise Onchain Infrastructure](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/enterprise.md): SOC 2 certified infrastructure, custom SLAs, 24/7 support and the team that co-authored ERC-4337, for companies that can't afford a dropped transaction. - [Stablecoin Settlement Infrastructure](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/stablecoin-processors.md): Execute stablecoin transactions reliably, at low latency, on 100+ EVM chains and Solana, with gas paid in the stablecoins you already move. - [Smart Account Infrastructure for Startups](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/startups.md): Ship smart accounts in hours with a paymaster, ERC-4337 bundler and SDK. Free on testnets, pay-as-you-go in production. The stack Daimo and Zora started on. - [Smart Account Infrastructure for Wallets](https://www.pimlico.io/solutions/wallets.md): Build gasless smart wallets with any signer and any smart account: ERC-4337 bundlers, paymasters and EIP-7702, trusted by MetaMask, Safe and Trust Wallet. ### Other pages - [Pimlico AI: Ask Your Agent About Your Account](https://www.pimlico.io/ai.md): Ask your AI about your Pimlico account: spend, failed operations, API keys and policies, via the pimlico CLI in Claude Code, Cursor or Codex. - [Blog](https://www.pimlico.io/blog.md): Engineering notes, research and company news from Pimlico, the team behind the gas sponsorship engine and co-authors of ERC-4337. - [Customers](https://www.pimlico.io/customers.md): The teams building on Pimlico: Circle, MetaMask, Safe, Trust Wallet, Zora, Tools for Humanity, and more, across wallets, consumer apps, and stablecoin payments. - [Smart Account & Signer Integrations](https://www.pimlico.io/integrations.md): Every major smart account and signer, already integrated with Pimlico's paymasters and bundlers: Safe, Kernel, MetaMask, Privy, Turnkey, passkeys and more. - [Pricing](https://www.pimlico.io/pricing.md): Free on testnets, pay-as-you-go in production with no monthly fee, custom Enterprise rates. Credit-based pricing for paymasters and ERC-4337 bundlers. - [Privacy Policy](https://www.pimlico.io/privacy.md): This Privacy Policy explains how Pimlico looks after your personal data when you visit our website or use our services, and your privacy rights. - [Solana Fee Sponsorship, or Pay Fees in USDC & USDT](https://www.pimlico.io/solana.md): Sponsor Solana transaction fees for your users, or let them pay in USDC or USDT. A Kora-compatible fee payer on mainnet and devnet, with your existing API key. - [Terms of Service](https://www.pimlico.io/tos.md): This Terms of Service will inform you about the terms of using Pimlico's services. --- [Blog](https://www.pimlico.io/blog.md) [Docs](https://docs.pimlico.io)[pimlico.io](https://www.pimlico.io/index.md)[Start building](https://dashboard.pimlico.io) [← All posts](https://www.pimlico.io/blog.md) Company # Pimlico raises $1.6m Pre-Seed Round **Kristof Gazso**September 25, 20233 min read Round**$1.6m pre-seed**Led by 1confirmation Backers**Safe, Consensys**And 10+ angels [Next**Powering Smart Accounts with a16z crypto Seed Backing**November 7, 2023](https://www.pimlico.io/blog/seed.md) We are excited to announce that [Pimlico](https://pimlico.io) has raised $1.6 million led by [1confirmation](https://www.1confirmation.com/), with further backing from [Safe](https://safe.global/), [Consensys](https://consensys.io/), 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](https://a16zcrypto.com/crypto-startup-school/) 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](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337) 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](https://docs.pimlico.io/references/bundler) have been allowing the reliable and fast relaying of smart account transaction on-chain, our [verifying paymasters](https://docs.pimlico.io/references/paymaster/verifying-paymaster) 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](https://docs.pimlico.io/references/paymaster/erc20-paymaster) 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](https://jobs.pimlico.io). 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 Pimlico is the gas sponsorship engine for onchain apps.[Start building](https://dashboard.pimlico.io) © 2026 Pimlico [RSS](https://www.pimlico.io/blog/rss.xml)[GitHub](https://github.com/pimlicolabs)[X](https://x.com/pimlicoHQ)[Docs](https://docs.pimlico.io)