Four friends who spent the COVID-19 lockdown era re-evaluating their careers have attracted venture capital funding, after ditching seemingly plum jobs at Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Canva and Atlassian to build their own start-up in the web3 market.

James Lin and Kane Lu, who met while studying finance at the University of Sydney, were living together during lockdown, when they began working on an idea for a software business that could help brands use blockchain to modernise their loyalty programs.