Donut Labs raises $22 million to launch AI-powered trading browser

Donut Labs has raised $22 million across pre-seed and seed rounds since the company was founded six months ago, for the world’s first AI browser built for trading. The agentic crypto browser hits the market under the emblem, Donut Browser. 

The two consecutive rounds received funding from BITKRAFT, Makers Fund, HSG, Sky9 Capital, MPCi, Altos Ventures, Hack VC, and additional investors. The entity also received contributions from industry leaders from Solana, Sui, Monad, and the core team from Jupiter, Drift, DeFi App, Manifold Trading, and more. 

According to Donut’s Founder & CEO Chris Zhu, “Donut is your personal AI quant inside a browser — and the next generation of AI-powered trading terminal.“ He adds that “Donut Agents in your browser will find better trades across any website, calculate risks before you place any order, and generate great returns on-chain for you even while you sleep. We want to redefine how users interact with the financial internet.”

As per available market data, the demand for the browser has seen 160k+ interested traders on its waitlists in the first quarter. 

Donut Lab’s Browser capitalizes on decentralized finance growth

In the last two years, decentralized finance has seen a significant uptick: DEX daily on-chain spot volume exceeds 20 billion, and the number of DeFi apps has skyrocketed.

With a monthly trading volume of over $1 trillion in September 2025—roughly three times higher than levels seen at the beginning of the year—on-chain perpetuals marked a clear transition toward DeFi and on-chain trading in the derivatives market.

To that end, Donut Labs developed an API-first data and audit stack, on-chain-grounded prompt benchmarks, a real-time critic loop, and multi-model orchestration for planning, execution, and routing. In addition to a Chromium core browser, Donut offers a Chrome extension, a webapp, and a mobile app.

“The next frontier of trading AI needs context for personalization, domain-specific knowledge, and training data on execution, but is severely constrained. Browsers provide the necessary contexts and act as a great Reinforcement Learning environment for DeFi agents,” said Chris Zhu. 

Donut has been designed to help traders level up with their own quant to discover signals, analyze charts, generate code-based strategies, and automate execution — all within one surface.

AI takes play in crypto and traditional trading

Artificial Intelligence has become an integral part of crypto and traditional trading. Just today, Wall Street broker Bernstein said in a note that Bitcoin miners are now an integral part of the artificial intelligence (AI) value chain.

The broker argued that miners’ large-scale power infrastructure and facilities have become critical to AI data centers. Mining stocks were flying in premarket trading following news of IREN’s AI cloud deal with Microsoft.

Much as AI has become a trader’s best friend, it comes with its caps and shortcomings.  It has been tempting, for a while, to treat AI models like ChatGPT as all-knowing oracles for every crisis in our lives. However, that era is officially over. Citing massive liability risks, Big Tech is slamming the brakes.

As of October 29, ChatGPT’s rules have reportedly changed: it will no longer provide specific medical, legal, or financial advice. As reported by Cryptopolitan, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman has pushed back on conscious AI, saying only biological beings can be conscious.

Mustafa Suleyman told CNBC during an interview that researchers should abandon work aimed at building AI systems that appear conscious. He called it the wrong approach entirely.

“I don’t think that is work that people should be doing,” Suleyman said at the conference where he gave a keynote speech. “If you ask the wrong question, you end up with the wrong answer. I think it’s totally the wrong question.”

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