Quick take:
- Connext Labs has raised $7.5 million in a strategic round at a $250 million valuation.
- The fundraising attracted leading web3 VC including Polygon Ventures, NGC Ventures and Polychain Capital, among others.
- The company is building the HTTP for web3, which will enable developers to build web3 apps that are accessible to all users.
Connext Labs has completed a $7.5 million strategic round backed by Polychain Capital, NGC Ventures, Polygon Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, KXVC, a_capital, No Limit Holdings, Factor, and Dokia Capital. The fundraising values the company at $250 million, having raised a total of $23.2 million to date.
The company said it will use the fresh capital to set up and operate Connext Foundation, which in turn will steward the development of the Connext Protocol. Some of the funds will also be dedicated to the long-term growth of the ecosystem through development grants and funding of community-led initiatives.
Connext says its new product will be the “HTTP for Web3” and will enable developers to build web3 applications that can be accessible by any user.
Although decentralised apps are empowering communities on the web through shared ownership and tokenised earnings mechanisms, they are not as accessible as web2 apps, which can be easily found on popular search engines.
In a recent Google Search podcast, the team discussed the difficulties Google crawlers face when trying to crawl web3 domains and related apps for specific services.
Connext is building a protocol that will make it possible for developers “to build interchain applications that can be accessed from any network and interact with funds and data on every blockchain, all at once,” the company wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
According to Connext, its underlying technology acts as a communication layer giving users the best possible security, regardless of the chain they are on.
Commenting on the fundraising, Connext founder Arjun Bhuptani said: “We pivoted our focus towards building this future as a public good. Today, Connext enables a new era of decentralized applications that, similar to applications on the web, can interact with users, data, and funds on many blockchains all at once.”
The company claims to have processed over 1.2 million transactions through Connext network and has added over 20,000 new users in the last month after launching V2 in February 2023.
Connext Labs was founded in 2017 and built its first payment-focused Layer-2 scalability system on Ethereum, which is today used by leading non-custodial crypto wallet MetaMask and The Graph, an indexing protocol for blockchain data, among others.
Joseph Lubin, Chairman at Ethereal Ventures and ConsenSys Mesh commented: “The Connext protocol not only revolutionizes how developers build Web3 applications but also addresses one of the most pressing issues in the blockchain landscape – security across chains.”
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