A fast riser in the decentralized finance, or DeFi, world has announced a $4.9 million raise on Sunday led by major industry venture capital groups — as well as some unusual upstart players.

Alchemix, a DeFi lending protocol whose loans automatically repay themselves via deposits into other yield-bearing protocols, announced on Discord the $4.9 million raise led by 10 investors, including industry mainstays CMS Holdings and Alameda Research, as well as upstart crypto VC players such as eGirl Capital.

Rounding out the investors are Immutable Capital, Nascent, Protoscale Capital, LedgerPrime, Fisher8 Capital, Orthogonal Trading and one unidentified “individual.”

“Alchemix aims to be one of the key money legos in the Ethereum ecosystem. It is the culmination of countless innovators and one great idea and a lot of hard work from our team,” said Scoopy Trooples, team lead at Alchemix. “We are excited to have the backing of a plethora of reputable investment firms. With their support we can charge ahead full time and make Alchemix even better.”

Unlike with many recent VC investments into DeFi protocols, the Alchemix team made some effort to disclose the terms of the round. Per its Discord post, the team sold tokens from its team treasury allocation at roughly $700 per ALCX token, with prices ranging from $680 to $800, according to the trading range of the token on the day of the sale, last Thursday.

The post said that the sale provides the equivalent of a one-year runway for the team, and specified that there is now a yearlong lockup on the team selling any further allocated tokens as well as a three-month lockup on the new investors selling theirs. The newly raised funds will be used for audits, contractors, hiring, marketing and community efforts.

Alchemix is part of a movement that has been referred to as the "Gen 2" of DeFi — a group of projects building on previous protocols that are currently outperforming the wider market.

CL, a partner at e-Girl Capital, spoke glowingly about the potential of the project.

“Personally I think the team is extremely capable, very bullish on the project as record amounts of stablecoins continue to be printed daily and flow into DeFi protocols, and the idea of immediately being able to spend future yield is very powerful,” they said.

The investment bolsters a growing trend of traditional legal entities and VC firms participating in fundraising rounds alongside newer, atypical investment bodies. However, as the tools for distributed autonomous organizations and treasury management smart contracts grow more sophisticated, anonymous individuals and entities may be making their way into more press releases.