Blockchain firm Sei Labs raises $30 million in funding round
Sei, a layer-1 (L1) blockchain focused on commerce, raised $30 million in new funding at a valuation of $800 million, according to a press release. Sei’s co-founder said the firm would use the new funds to increase its footprint in the Asia-Pacific region and find the right strategic partners.
Sei valued at $800 million after new financing
Commerce-focused L1 blockchain firm Sei said it had secured $30 million in two strategic funding rounds, taking its valuation to $800 million. Investors participating in the rounds include Jump, Distributed Global, Multicoin, Asymmetric, Flow Traders, Hypersphere and Bixin Ventures.
Sei Labs co-founder Jayendra Jog said the fresh capital would help the company facilitate growth and increase its presence in the Asia-Pacific region and connect with the “right strategic partners, especially entering the mainnet,” Furthermore, the funding will also allow Sei to strengthen its position as one of the leading tier-1 solutions and further promote the global development of digital assets, Sei said in the press release.
Jog said the main goal is to “build the best infrastructure for exchange.” He said crypto projects are also using Sei to build games, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces and rollups.
“It’s not just DeFi, but other things [applications] which derives demand from trade.”
– Jog added.
The new funding comes less than a year after Sei completed a $5 seed round, which Sei said was not “just focused on capital, but on getting the right set of partners.” Recently, the blockchain announced the launch of a $50 million ecosystem and liquidity fund to promote the burgeoning decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on the platform.
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What is Sei?
Unlike other multipurpose L1 blockchain developers used by developers to build projects, Sei’s primary focus is on the development of a crypto trading network through the chain. Some of the biggest L1 blockchains for building projects include Ethereum, Near, Solana, Avalanche and more.
Led by a team of experienced developers and executives from Goldman Sachs, Databricks, Robinhood, Google and Nvidia, Sei believes that existing blockchain networks are not optimized for high-frequency trading and are too slow for real-world financial applications.
Sei currently has more than 120 projects building on top of the blockchain. The company said its latest public test network involved 3.6 million unique users and processed over 35 million transactions in less than a month in March. Sei is still in its public testnet phase, although it plans to roll out the mainnet later this year, Jog said.
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About the author
Tim Fries is the co-founder of The Tokenist. He has a B. Sc. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Tim served as a Senior Associate in the investment team at RW Baird’s US Private Equity division and is also a co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an investment firm specializing in sensing, protection and control solutions.
