Kuru Labs’ $11.6m round sets stage for the ultimate DEX experiment

What if Uniswap’s model isn’t the endgame? Kuru Labs, backed by Paradigm’s latest investment, is testing that theory with an audacious plan to replace AMMs entirely with an on-chain orderbook. Success could redefine DeFi’s trading infrastructure.

On July 7, Kuru Labs, the startup building a decentralized exchange on Ethereum-compatible Monad, announced an $11.6 million Series A funding round led by Paradigm.

The raise, which follows a $2 million seed round last year, will fuel the development of what could be the first fully functional on-chain central limit orderbook for the EVM. The round included participation from notable angel investors like Viktor Bunin, Zagabond, and former FTX product lead Tristan Yver, signaling strong industry confidence in Kuru’s approach.

Building for a post-AMM future

The $11.6 million capital injection led by Paradigm will primarily accelerate Kuru Labs’ two biggest priorities: expanding its engineering team and deploying its hybrid orderbook model on Monad’s upcoming mainnet.

Unlike traditional AMM-based DEXs, Kuru’s architecture merges a central limit orderbook with a fallback automated market maker, creating a structure designed to offer tighter spreads while ensuring liquidity doesn’t dry up, at least in theory. The platform is built as a vertically integrated liquidity hub, including a discovery terminal, token launchpad, and tools for both active and passive liquidity provision.

According to the announcement, Kuru’s goal is to streamline the DeFi trading stack into a single interface, something Kuru’s team believes legacy DEXs have failed to do.

“We are grateful to all of our investors for their confidence in us, and for the vibrant Monad and Kuru communities’ continuous support,” the team stated in its announcement. “We look forward to launching on mainnet and building the decentralized liquidity hub for the Monad ecosystem!”

Kuru’s approach is ambitious because it challenges a fundamental DeFi assumption: that AMMs, despite their inefficiencies, are the only viable model for decentralized trading.

Orderbooks have long been the gold standard in traditional finance, offering price precision and deeper liquidity, but they’ve struggled on-chain due to Ethereum’s latency and gas costs. Even Solana’s lightning-fast DEXs like Phoenix rely on off-chain components, making Kuru’s fully on-chain CLOB a high-stakes technical gamble.

Kuru’s entire thesis hinges on Monad’s technical promises: 10,000 transactions per second and one-second block finality. Existing EVM chains like Ethereum and Arbitrum can’t support a functional orderbook because gas fees and slow blocks disincentivize market makers from updating quotes frequently.

Monad’s parallelized EVM execution and optimized state database aim to eliminate those bottlenecks, making it the first chain where an on-chain CLOB could feasibly compete with centralized exchanges.