Founded in late 2022 by Alex Ryvkin, a London Business School (LBS) MBA2014 alumnus, Rho Labs is revolutionising the financial landscape with its innovative approach to crypto-specific and traditional finance rates. After raising $2.2 million in a pre-seed round led by Speedinvest in April 2024, the company secured an additional $4 million in seed funding this February (2025), led by CoinFund, to accelerate the growth of their Cryptonative Rates Exchange, Rho Protocol (a platform for trading interest rates specifically designed for cryptocurrencies). In our exclusive interview, Alex, a London Business School Incubator alumnus, shares insights into Rho Labs’ journey, the challenges they’ve overcome, and their pioneering efforts in interest rate derivatives.
Q: Can you share the story behind the founding of Rho Labs? What inspired you to establish the company, how did you identify the need for an institutional interest rate derivates market (a marketplace where big financial players trade contracts based on interest rates) in both crypto-specific and traditional finance rates?
AR: Rates as an asset class are the best-kept public secret in finance. With a total open interest of over $500 trillion (yes, that’s trillion 😊), it is the single largest asset class in capital markets. While most people outside of trading are not familiar with the asset class (over 90% of it is traded by professionals), many consumer finance products, such as fixed rate mortgages, wouldn’t be possible without interest rate derivative trading. It is fair to say rates are everywhere, even when we don’t know it.
In the past five years, we’ve witnessed a rapid professionalisation of the crypto trading market. While memecoins (cryptocurrencies created as jokes or based on internet memes) and pump-and-dump schemes(scams where the price of a stock or cryptocurrency is artificially increased and then sold off) are still a thing, we’ve seen a number of professional traders entering the space, bringing in highly sophisticated trading strategies and professional risk management. Neither is realistically possible without rates instruments.
Q: What is Rho Labs aiming to achieve?
AR: Our primary goal is to become a pre-eminent, most liquid venue in crypto for all rates trading.
The LBS Experience
Q: How did your experience at the London Business School (LBS) and the LBS Incubator in 2016 contribute to the formation of Rho Labs?
AR: My entrepreneurial career effectively started at the LBS Incubator. Transitioning from a well-paid job in finance to entrepreneurship is scary. As a first-time founder, the amount of information you have to process is overwhelming, the breadth of optionality is confusing, and the combination of responsibilities and risks appears borderline unmanageable.
The Incubator provided us with two critical components: a group of people going through the same process that you can confide in and relate to, and the visibility of a structure to what is, in essence, a rather chaotic process of trial and error (which you are trained to call ‘rapid experimentation’).
In addition, London is full of people whose job is to know what’s currently going on in places such as the LBS Incubator, and the relationship works as a door opener.
Challenges and Resilience in Early Stages
Q: What specific challenges did you encounter during the early stages of founding Rho Labs, and how did you overcome them?
AR: We launched the company at the end of 2022, in the wake of FTX’s collapse. We were at the bottom of the VC fundraising cycle, while confidence in the future of crypto was at its lowest, with many investors pulling back from the space entirely.
What made us one of the very few firms that managed to launch and raise funds in that climate was our commitment to the process. We took one step at a time, kept our heads down, kept building and iterating on our product, and remained prudent with spending. Eventually, we found ourselves in a much stronger position in the bull market, ready for expansion.
Rumour has it that the firms that launch at the bottom of the cycle are the most resilient in the long run. Let’s hope we will be able to prove this.
Lessons from the past
Q: You’ve founded AssetBar, which aimed to revolutionize peer-to-peer asset investment. How did the experiences and lessons from AssetBar influence the development and vision of Rho Labs? What were your learnings? What did you do in between? Was there a connection between the two business ideas?
AR: As it often happens with first entrepreneurial ventures, I made my fair share of mistakes with AssetBar. The timing was, perhaps, the biggest one: the peer-to-peer boom I was betting on was all but out by early 2017.
After AssetBar, I launched and ran another greenfield project as a CEO, ran a consultancy, and then as CPO, in charge of product and engineering, I helped crypto custodian Copper.co, one of the biggest success stories in UK crypto and fintech, scale from 35 to 350 people in less than two years.
Every one of those experiences resulted in invaluable (and often painful!) lessons that help me to avoid many costly mistakes for Rho… and perhaps make some new ones!
Unlocking New Trading Opportunities
Q: Rho Labs aims to create an institutional IRD market for both crypto-specific rates and traditional finance rates. Can you elaborate on how this approach unlocks new trading strategies and opportunities?
AR: In traditional capital markets, rates products provide predictability of cash flows, which is critical for markets to operate. The ability to predict with significant certainty how much you will be making on a given investment, allows for better financial planning and opens up a multitude of opportunities to tap that future cash flow to deploy in various strategies and transactions. That’s why rates products are key foundational building blocks in global finance. We expect them to take the same position in the crypto-ecosystem.
Besides, traditional rates products, when applied to crypto-native rates, which are inherently way more volatile and short-term, tend to present very different characteristics and use cases to a prospective investor.
Q: In what ways do you foresee Rho Labs impacting the broader financial landscape with its focus on interest rate derivatives?
AR: While our short-term strategy is focused on products and clients in the crypto ecosystem, our framework allows for much broader use. One of the most prominent themes in blockchain today is the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) (turning physical assets like property into digital tokens on a blockchain). By now, the superiority of blockchain as settlement rails (systems used to complete financial transactions) for a significant portion of financial transactions is not being debated, even by the most conservative financial institutions. Once traditional assets, such as bonds or real estate, are traded and settled on blockchain, a product such as Rho Protocol will be similarly required to provide blockchain-based infrastructure for rates products. Our current strategy is inherently linked to our trust in a RWA-enabled future and our ambition to set ourselves up as a gold standard for blockchain-based rates trading by the time the industry calls on us to venture outside of the crypto ecosystem.
Future Goals
Q: Congratulations on securing $4 million in seed funding in February this year! How will this funding be utilized to enhance your technology, expand the team, and broaden the reach of Rho Labs’ offerings?
AR: We have set out very ambitious goals for 2025 and 2026. We have significantly increased our capacity, especially in product and engineering, and are preparing a full-scale public launch of our product in the next couple of months.
In addition, we have been working on a number of exciting products and partnerships that will soon start coming to fruition, and we can’t wait to announce them to our community. The current favourable market conditions allow many ideas that we have been contemplating to see the light, which is very exciting for us.
Q: What role did CoinFund, Speedinvest and other backers play in supporting Rho Labs, and how has their involvement been instrumental in your journey?
AR: The common maxim suggests money is a commodity, and finding the right investor who can provide more than just cash is one of the most important tasks of the Founder. Equally, taking money from the wrong investor is one of the easiest and surest ways to fail.
We were extremely lucky to get Speedinvest, one of the best known fintech investors in Europe, as our early backers. Now, with the addition of CoinFund, one of the oldest and most respected Web3 VCs in the US, notwithstanding other important backers, we could not hope for a better team to support us into the next stage of growth.
From the early days, we could always count on our investors’ time, expertise and network, which turned out to be invaluable in virtually every aspect of our business.
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Based on your entrepreneurial journey, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs, especially those looking to venture into the fintech space?
On one hand, doing startups is entirely irrational. A status job and a monthly salary are heavy drugs, and Elon’s ‘chew on the glass, while looking into the abyss’ is a pretty accurate description of early forays into entrepreneurship. Therefore, I do think that people who become successful and should do startups are people who cannot NOT do startups. On the other hand, I also think that the only way to find out whether you’re one of those people is to try, so everyone should do it at least once in their career.
The second suggestion would be always to go all-in. Good startup ideas typically come up while working hard on lousy startup ideas. So, for most people, working on an idea on the side and contemplating leaving a cushy job just in case it proves to be a good one would never work out. So, if you have the itch and the circumstances permit, save some money, get buy-in from your family, and just do it.
And once you’re in it, get comfortable with the idea that you will most likely fail without hiding behind ‘statistically’ and similar monikers that make the failure less palpable. The feeling of being at peace with potential failure is liberating, and paradoxically, it will allow you to make much better decisions in your business, drastically improving your chances of success. And if you, in fact, do fail, the truth is – nobody cares. Just dust yourself off and start again.