Uniswap

Uniswap is a decentralized exchange protocol for swapping crypto tokens through automated market maker pools, and Uniswap Labs is the company that builds it along with a web app, wallet, developer tools and the Unichain network. Hayden Adams, a former Siemens mechanical engineer, started the project after being laid off in July 2017 and deployed it to Ethereum mainnet on November 2, 2018. The UNI governance token followed in 2020, distributed retroactively to early users.

Uniswap Labs raised a seed round from Paradigm in 2019. In August 2020 Andreessen Horowitz led an $11 million Series A, with USV, Paradigm, Version One, Variant, ParaFi Capital, SV Angel and A.Capital also investing. In October 2022 Polychain Capital led a $165 million Series B that valued the company at $1.66 billion, with existing backers a16z crypto, Paradigm, SV Angel and Variant participating. Uniswap Labs bought NFT aggregator Genie in June 2022 and the AMM and routing team Guidestar in October 2025.

The company remains private and has not sold or listed. At the 2022 raise the protocol had handled $1.2 trillion in trading volume and held 64% of decentralized exchange volume according to DeFi Llama; by November 2025 cumulative volume was about $4 trillion. The SEC sent Uniswap Labs a Wells notice in 2024, then in February 2025 closed its investigation with no action. In November 2025 Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap Foundation proposed UNIfication, which turns on protocol fees, uses them to burn UNI and burns 100 million UNI from the treasury, and governance approved it in December 2025.

Uniswap shows a different route to liquidity for venture backers. Paradigm backed the project at the seed stage less than a year after launch, and Andreessen Horowitz led an $11 million Series A in 2020, both small checks relative to the later price, while the token, not the equity, became the main way value accrued and traded publicly. The equity has had no sale or listing eight years after launch, and the company's 2022 Series B priced Labs at $1.66 billion while the UNI market cap was near $5 billion, down from more than $22.5 billion at the 2021 peak. Investors here hold both equity and tokens, and returns depend on governance votes such as the fee switch as much as on company operations.