Avail, a blockchain designed to assist other blockchains scale, today announced a $43 million Series A funding round led by Founders Fund, Dragonfly, and Cyber Fund. Combined with pre-seed and seed funding, the whole funding now stands at $75 million.
Avail’s customers are layer-2 blockchains, that are blockchains like Base, Polygon, Arbritrum or Opitmism that assemble batches of transactions and write them to a primary or layer-1 chain. Avail offers services specifically for rollups, a sort of layer-2 designed to scale networks. By processing transactions outside of the important blockchain, rollups help reduce costs and help a sequence avoid delays brought on by congestion.
Co-founder Anurag Arjun said Assets that the success of Web3 relies on each of the tens of hundreds of blockchains interacting seamlessly with one another – or risk a fragmented user experience. Both Arjun and co-founder Prabal Banerjee are blockchain veterans and met while working at Polygon, a well-liked layer-2 that’s now compatible with Avail.
“There are hundreds of rollups and it is a very fragmented ecosystem. That is why we are developing a way [them] so users don’t have to deal with the complexity of the infrastructure,” said Arjun.
Ethereum essentially provides two components to Layer-2: data availability and settlement. Rollups on Avail will maintain settlement on Ethereum, but Avail hopes to exchange the information availability side.
The company plans to make use of the $75 million it raised to develop three core products: the foundational Data Availability (DA) layer, the Nexus Unification layer, and an additive security layer called Fusion. Together, they form a unified infrastructure layer that may theoretically be compatible with quite a lot of chains. However, the corporate plans to begin with rollups within the Ethereum ecosystem.
“Their DA solution, paired with their Nexus interoperability layer and Fusion security layer, makes it super seamless and easy for teams to build a new protocol (across all crypto categories) while leveraging Avail’s tech stack,” said Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, in a press release.
