Last year, while passing by an office building in Silicon Valley, I happened to see a diagram on a conference room whiteboard that hadn’t been erased yet—three curves in different colors trending upward, with the words “Kite, the third wave” written beside them. At that moment, it struck me that top investment institutions look at blockchain projects much like trend watchers: they don’t chase things that have already soared, but rather seek out those with unique structures and designs poised to catch the next wave.

**Seed Round: The Blueprint in the Garage**

In the winter of 2019, Kite was just three old computers in a garage in Palo Alto. A young partner from a leading VC firm went to check it out late at night, staring at the flickering node data on the screen for almost an hour before asking, “What material do you plan to use to weave this line?” The question cut straight to the core—Kite’s layered data availability protocol.

That $1.8 million seed round included participation from the investment arm of a compliant trading platform. They brought not just funding, but also early compliance advice. There was an interesting detail: the investment terms required the team to participate in at least two traditional kite-flying events each year. The founder later said that this seemingly quirky requirement actually inspired them to continually find architectural ideas in the physical world.

**Series A: When Wall Street Meets Unconventional Thinking**

The Series A round in the spring of 2021 was like a meticulously staged performance.