Blockchain interoperability firm LayerZero Labs valued at $3B after $120M funding round

LayerZero Labs, which builds technology to help blockchain protocols communicate with each other, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $120 million in a funding round led by a16z crypto, part of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.

Now with a war chest of roughly $250 million, the blockchain interoperability firm is currently valued at $3 billion. More than 30 investors participated in the round, including Christie’s, Circle Ventures, OpenSea Ventures, Samsung Next, Sequoia Capital, OKX Ventures and BOND.

“You have all these blockchains that are isolated execution environments,” said Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. Fortune. “Some of them are fast and cheap. Some of them are slow and safe. Some of them are good for storage.”

Pellegrino and his co-founders decided to combat how fragmented the world of blockchain has become with LayerZero, which he calls a “messaging protocol,” or code that allows developers to send data from Ethereum to Solana, for example.

“There is no longer any doubt that the future of crypto and Web3 is multi-chain,” Ali Yahya, general partner at a16z crypto, said in a statement. “LayerZero already handles more transactions to and from large ecosystems than the original bridges.”

The massive funding round is one of the largest for a crypto company in 2023, and the multi-billion dollar valuation of LayerZero Labs places it in the delicate echelon of crypto giants like Coinbase, whose market capitalization was just under $15 billion as of Tuesday. morning.

The rise of LayerZero is all the more impressive considering the company first launched a little more than a year ago, according to CEO Pellegrino.

A college dropout turned professional poker player, Pellegrino became a repeat startup founder after the US government banned online poker in 2011. After studying computer science in college, he created a fantasy sports site, which he sold two years after its creation.

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Then his whirlwind entrepreneurial career continued as he worked for professional baseball teams, did independent research on machine learning algorithms and started yet another company. LayerZero Labs, which now has a staff of 42, is his and co-founder Ryan Zarick’s latest venture.

While LayerZero Labs charges a fee for each piece of data sent through the messaging protocol, the significant amount of funding allows the company to look beyond pure profit margin, Pellegrino says.

He and Zarick plan to further establish dominance in the growing field of companies that offer developers methods to send data between different blockchains. (Competitors include Cosmos, which also brands itself as a layer-zero, or protocol through which different blockchains can send and receive data.)

“Our goal is to win and take the entire market share in the area,” Pellegrino said Fortune.

In particular, he says LayerZero Labs will use its new capital injection to expand its presence in Web3 games as well as in the Asia-Pacific region. The company currently has offices in Vancouver and Hong Kong.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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