UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL AUG 28 9AM ET A group of former Jump Trading, Coinbase (COIN) and Citadel Securities engineers said it raised $20 million in new funding for trading infrastructure startup aPriori, bringing the total capital raised to $30 million. The round included participation from HashKey Capital, Pantera Capital, Primitive Ventures, IMC Trading, GEM, Gate Labs, Ambush Capital and Big Brain Collective, according to a release. San Francisco-based aPriori is building what it calls an execution layer for on-chain markets, designed for high-performance Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) networks. The firm uses high-frequency trading practices in an attempt to reduce issues that plague crypto markets like wide spreads and maximal extractable value (MEV) leakage. Founder Ray Song said the company’s system segments order flow in real time and redistributes MEV to stakers in an attempt to improve yields and network alignment. APriori has developed a liquid-staking platform and an AI-powered decentralized exchange aggregator called Swapr, both of which are intended to improve execution for traders and liquidity providers. Pantera Capital’s Nihal Maunder said the firm increased its investment because aPriori is one of the few projects with the technical capability to bring traditional execution standards to decentralized finance (DeFi). The company plans to use the new funds to expand hiring, accelerate product rollouts and deepen partnerships across the trading and staking ecosystem.