New announcement from 0xmgb in Discord:

**We’re proud to announce that we’ve closed a $1.5M strategic round including Mirana Ventures, Caladan, Zoku Ventures, and a small number of other key partners.**

**To welcome Omni’s next phase of growth, we’ve now opened the referral program to all users.**

As previously shared by Variational co-founder <@958831822773567548>, the bulk of Variational’s development has been funded by the team’s past market making profits. Thus, the main purpose of this round was not to raise additional capital–it was to align partners who could help drive Variational’s long-term vision.

<https://x.com/variational_lvs/status/1925607454957871570>

Since we weren’t after capital, we were able to intentionally keep this raise small to minimize averse dilution. Every participant in the raise was carefully vetted, and has a clear way in which they will support the Variational Protocol’s development or growth.

Mirana, for example, can help support OLP TVL (if needed) and allow the platform to support more OI. Caladan can be an early market maker (and design partner) quoting on Pro, and potentially help Omni with more listings in the near-term by collaborating on building quoting models for more exotic markets.

As we celebrate our new partners, we’ve also decided to open up the referral program on Omni to all users. For the past few weeks, the referral program has been in testing with a small number of users. Now, it can be accessed by all traders on Omni.

Since Omni is still in private beta, the only way for new users to gain access is to use a referral code from an existing user. Today’s expansion of the referral program will begin making these codes much more available and easy to come by.

* *Read more info on the strategic round raise:* <https://x.com/variational_io/status/1930300230316240968>
* *Read Variational co-founder <@958831822773567548>'s explanation of why we raised more from VCs during an anti-VC meta:* <https://x.com/variational_lvs/status/1930301466905870725>
* *Check out our announcement about referrals:* <https://mirror.xyz/variational-io.eth/QIzi5qUrw9_Adaf5uGNIJMVKm-Bwry8TrdfiW6cVGtc>

@everyone