PERPTools secures $8 million to develop AI-native perpetual trading
PERPTools, an artificial intelligence (AI) native perpetuals trading platform built by DEXTools developers, has raised $8 million in two token rounds.
Fundraising began back in November 2025, and the first, pre-seed round closed in December of the same year, while the second, seed round extended into early 2026, as revealed to Finbold on Thursday, October 1.
The first round, led by DEXTools Ventures and Orderly Network, brought in $3 million at a $30 million fully diluted valuation (FDV). In addition, it brought together Orderly Network’s omnichain liquidity infrastructure with DEXTools’ trading platform and established user base.
“We built the execution layer for 30 million traders already inside DEXTools. By embedding directly into the analytics platform and plugging into Orderly’s omnichain engine, we solved the cold-start problem before we even launched. $240 million in beta volume proves that when you remove the friction between discovery and execution, traders receive the best experience possible,” Evgen Tokarev, CEO of PERPTools, told Finbold.
More liquidity in perpetual trading
The second round raised an additional $5 million at an $80 million FDV and brought in BigBrain Holdings, NEAR, Animoca Brands, Sfermion, and Shima Capital as key stakeholders. The round also brought funds with consumer-crypto and creator-economy portfolios, which help support the “audience side” of PERPTools’ model.
What’s more, every ticket in the round contributes distribution, liquidity, or ecosystem alignment, not just capital alone.
“PERPTools is exactly the kind of builder Orderly’s liquidity layer was designed for. A team that already has millions of users and needs institutional-grade depth on day one. Embedding a full perp DEX inside a platform with 30 million traders is a genuine first, and the beta volume already speaks for itself,” Ran Yi, CEO & Co-founder of Orderly Network, echoed Tokarev’s sentiment.
Shared liquidity without bridging assets
PERPTools builds on Orderly Network’s omnichain liquidity engine, an orderbook-based trading infrastructure that delivers shared liquidity across supported chains without requiring users to bridge assets. As a key stakeholder and strategic partner, Orderly Network further gives PERPTools access to institutional-grade market infrastructure.
Ahead of its Token Generation Event (TGE), PERPTools has already launched three live products. The first was Perp DEX, a perpetual exchange with non-custodial deposits, live on mainnet. On the platform, users can open long and short positions, trade with leverage, and access cross-margin, with execution and settlement powered by Orderly’s omnichain central limit order book (CLOB).
Another one was AI Arena, a live marketplace for autonomous onchain trading agents. In the Arena, traders deploy agents by defining a risk profile, leverage limits, and a free-form trading strategy in natural language. In turn, agents trade 24/7 against the same liquidity as the Perp DEX. What’s more, users can allocate USD Coin (USDC) to agents, while performance rankings are based on verified 30-day onchain Profit and Loss (PnL) to provide a transparent record.
The third one was Tap Prediction. A real-time prediction market built around live perpetual futures price feeds, Tap Prediction offers payouts of up to 25x. Users simply select a cell on a price grid, stake as little as $0.10, and receive the corresponding multiplier if their prediction is correct. Notably, the product has a prize pool exceeding $1 million and is already generating revenue ahead of TGE.
“DEXTools became the place where DeFi found its next trade. PERPTools is the natural next chapter, where the trade itself happens without ever leaving. We’ve watched our traders ask for this for years, and the response to Season 1 tells us everything: $240 million in beta volume before the token even exists. Now the entire flow from discovery to execution lives in one place, and 30 million traders are first in line,” Frederic Fernández, Co-Founder and CMO of DEXTools, further told Finbold.
Closing the gap between market discovery and trade execution
With both funding rounds completed, and with the products mentioned above already live , PERPTools is now shifting its focus from fundraising to execution and growth.
By combining institutional-grade liquidity with the distribution and reach of the DEXTools ecosystem, the platform seeks to help users discover markets, access trading tools, and execute positions within the same ecosystem and explore perpetual futures, which now generate more than $10 billion in daily trading volume across decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Overall, as PERPTools targets its Q4 2026 TGE, it aims to close the gap between market discovery and trade execution, while evolving the DEXTools ecosystem from a market intelligence platform into a comprehensive trading interface with all the tools, liquidity, and infrastructure needed to act swiftly on emerging market opportunities.
Featured image via Shutterstock
