- Umia is targeting what its founders see as crypto’s biggest weakness: broken capital formation, not infrastructure.
- The platform introduces non-custodial treasuries and decision markets to align incentives between founders and token holders.
- Agentic ventures and AI-driven execution could reshape how startups raise capital, moving away from traditional VC models.
Crypto has spent years obsessing over infrastructure—faster chains, cheaper transactions, better throughput.
Speaking to CCN’s Giuseppe Fabio Ciccomascolo, Francesco Mosterts, co-founder and CEO of Umia, said that the phase is largely solved.
The real bottleneck now sits elsewhere.
“The infrastructure now is solid,” he said. “It can support much higher throughput, much higher TVL, much more utilization.”
What hasn’t kept up, he argues, is how value is created, distributed, and managed once a project launches.
That realization became the starting point for Umia.
From Infrastructure to Capital Formation
Mosterts comes from Chainbound, a research lab working across the EVM stack and advising blockchain infrastructure projects.
But over time, the team noticed a pattern. The issues they kept encountering weren’t technical. They were financial and structural.
“The problem is more at the capital formation layer,” he said.
In other words, crypto may have figured out how to build systems—but not how to fund, govern, and sustain them in a way that scales.
Umia is designed to address that gap. The platform allows projects to launch tokens, raise capital, and wrap their operations in a minimal legal structure tied to intellectual property.
More importantly, it introduces a different way of managing treasury funds.
Instead of relying on founders or centralized teams, Umia uses what Mosterts describes as “decision markets”—a system where token holders influence how capital is allocated.
The goal is to reduce what he calls the “principal-agent problem,” where founders control funds that don’t always align with investor expectations.
A Different Model for Crypto Fundraising
At a high level, Umia is built for a specific type of project: what Mosterts calls “agentic ventures.”
These are ventures driven by AI agents rather than traditional teams, with faster execution cycles and different capital needs.
“Umia is a platform that allows ventures that are built with AI agents to be tokenized,” he said. “It allows projects to raise capital, and investors to invest and speculate on the future success of these ventures.”
That structure comes with trade-offs.
Agentic ventures tend to rely more on operational spending than large upfront capital expenditures, and they move faster than traditional startups.
That makes standard venture capital models—equity rounds, SAFE agreements, long timelines—less suitable.
“This type of entity is not going to use the classic playbook,” Mosterts said.
Why Existing Models Fall Short
Crypto has experimented with token-based fundraising for years, but the results have been mixed.
Mosterts doesn’t shy away from that reality.
“It’s clear tokens did not have a great success,” he said.
He points to several reasons: regulatory uncertainty, misaligned incentives, and flawed token economics.
“You have a token that has such a high inflation that you buy something, the market cap is going up, but the price is going down,” he said.
In many cases, he argues, tokens became detached from the actual value they were supposed to represent.
Umia’s approach is to tie value more directly to decision-making and treasury management, giving token holders a clearer role in how capital is used.
The aim is not just to launch tokens—but to make them function as a viable financial primitive.
The Hardest Problem Isn’t Technical
Despite the complexity of the product, Mosterts says the biggest challenge so far hasn’t been building it.
“The protocol itself has been pretty smooth,” he said.
The real challenge is distribution—getting both sides of the market to understand and adopt a new model.
On one side are founders building agentic ventures. On the other hand, investors are trying to understand a different kind of capital formation.
Explaining why this model matters—and how it improves on existing systems—has been the harder task.
“That is the biggest bottleneck,” he said.
Trust, Transparency, and a Skeptical Market
Crypto’s history also makes adoption harder.
After years of failed token models, inflated valuations, and misaligned incentives, users have grown skeptical.
For Mosterts, rebuilding trust starts with acknowledging what went wrong.
“Being sincere about what worked and what didn’t work at the industry level,” he said, is key.
That includes addressing issues like poor token design, lack of transparency, and the disconnect between token holders and project outcomes.
By restructuring how treasuries are managed and how decisions are made, Umia is trying to close that gap.
The Shift Few Are Paying Attention To
Looking ahead, Mosterts sees a broader shift that hasn’t fully registered yet: the impact of AI-driven ventures on capital formation.
“People are not looking at it,” he said.
Agentic ventures—projects driven by autonomous systems—are already generating revenue in some cases. But the implications go beyond that.
They could change how startups are funded, structured, and scaled.
“What is the implication then on capital raising?” he said. “This type of entity is not going to use the classic playbook.”
That shift, he believes, is still underappreciated.
Scaling Means Listening, Not Just Building
If there’s one lesson Mosterts highlights from building in crypto, it’s that scaling doesn’t come from sticking rigidly to a roadmap.
“Scaling is a factor of having a tight feedback loop with your users,” he said.
Umia itself has evolved in that way. What started as a broader capital formation layer has narrowed its focus to agentic ventures.
Paradoxically, that narrower focus is what he sees as the path to scaling.
“It seems like a narrowing of the scope, but it’s actually a scaling of the scope,” he said.
What Comes Next for Umia
Umia is still in development, with a planned launch around mid-Q2 2026.
The technical side is largely complete, along with the legal framework. The next phase is distribution—bringing projects and users onto the platform.
The first token launch is expected to happen through a crowdfunding-style mechanism, with a pipeline of projects already in discussion.
More broadly, Mosterts sees the intersection of crypto and agentic systems as still in its early stages.
Like previous cycles, it may start with experimentation and speculation before settling into something more durable.
“It always goes very degen and then slowly builds into something that actually has value,” he said.
For Umia, the bet is that this time, the structure behind that value will matter more than the hype around it.
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Insha Zia is the News Editor at CCN. Based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, he ensures the CCN newsroom provides value to readers by educating, informing, and engaging them with accurate and timely coverage.
Before joining CCN, Insha was a Senior Journalist at DailyCoin, where his career in crypto journalism took off. At DailyCoin he garnered ample experience by covering some of the biggest news in the crypto industry, especially in the Cardano ecosystem, and maintain solid relations with KOLs in the industry.
Insha has worked as a ghostwriter and a developer for three years. He has co-authored numerous articles in reputable publications, including Hackernoon, Yahoo Finance, and Nasdaq. He also has experience as a Solidity Developer and a Data Analyst.
Insha’s developer and journalist backgrounds go hand in hand when educating readers on technically complex concepts within the crypto space. He values accuracy, transparency, and delivering valuable insights to his readers.
Insha firmly believes education can propel the mass adoption of the crypto space. He is committed to giving CCN readers a greater understanding of the technology using his technical background.
Insha earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, in 2022. His technical foundation includes expertise in quantitative and qualitative research, data analysis, programming languages, and cybersecurity.
His comprehensive skill set enables him to communicate complex concepts to crypto readers with authority and clarity, making his articles both informative and engaging for his audience.
Insha is determined to take CCN to the top of the industry. When he’s not working on his next article or editing, Insha enjoys playing video games, mainly in FPS and MMORPG genres. He also loves playing soccer and has supported Arsenal since he was six.
Giuseppe Ciccomascolo began his career as an investigative journalist in Italy, where he contributed to both local and national newspapers, focusing on various financial sectors.
Upon relocating to London, he worked as an analyst for Fitch's CapitalStructure and later as a Senior Reporter for Alliance News. In 2017, Giuseppe transitioned to covering cryptocurrency-related news, producing documentaries and articles on Bitcoin and other emerging digital currencies. He also played a pivotal role in establishing the academy for a cryptocurrency exchange website. Crypto remained his primary area of interest throughout his tenure as a writer for ThirdFloor.
