Funding Frontier: Polychain
Polychain is a leading venture capital firm focused on the crypto and blockchain sectors. Founded in 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee, a former Coinbase employee, Polychain is dedicated to investing in blockchain-based digital assets and actively managing portfolios for exceptional returns. With $175 million AUM, Polychain has a successful track record of leading investments in over 100 projects1. The firm is recognized as a prominent player in the emerging technologies investment space.
Cubist
Cubist has raised $7 million in seed round led by Polychain Capital with participation from other investors on March 9th, 2023. Cubist is a security-focused developer tools company that aims to help Web3 developers create safer dapps with a modular set of security-focused dev tools. The company is developing software engineering best practices throughout the lifecycle of a dapp, from Continuous Integration testing to push-button deployment backed by secure credential management. With the first SDK designed for multi- and cross-chain development and testing, Cubist provides users with the ability to write cross-chain dapps and change chains or bridge providers with a single line of configuration. The company intends to use the seed funding to expand its team, accelerate product development, and scale technological capabilities to provide efficient, seamless, and secure Web3 development solutions.
Scroll
Scroll has raised $50 million in venture round led by Polychain Capital and Bain Crypto with participation from various investors on March 6th, 2023. Scroll, an EVM-equivalent zkRollup on Ethereum, utilizes the zkEVM to prove the correctness of EVM execution in Layer 2 and aims to enable native compatibility for existing Ethereum applications and tools. The current Scroll architecture is composed of three infrastructure components, namely the Scroll Node, Roller Network, and Rollup and Bridge Contracts. The Scroll Node constructs L2 blocks, commits them to the Ethereum base layer, and passes messages between L1 and L2. The Roller Network generates the zkEVM validity proofs for correct transaction execution, while the Rollup and Bridge Contracts verify these proofs, provide data availability for Scroll transactions, and enable asset transfer between Ethereum and Scroll. Although Scroll's initial version is centralized, the company is committed to decentralizing its sequencing nodes in the future.
Polyhedra
Polyhedra has raised $10 million in strategic round led by Polychain Capital and Binance Labs with participation from other investors on February 21st, 2023. Polyhedra Network is a next-generation infrastructure for Web3 interoperability, scalability, and privacy that uses advanced zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology. The team consists of top engineers and developers from UC Berkeley, Tsinghua University, and Stanford University. Polyhedra Network aims to provide highly-efficient interoperability solutions for asset transfers, message passing, and data sharing between various Web2 and Web3 systems. Polyhedra Network has developed several next-generation zkSNARK protocols, including zkBridge and zkDID. The zkBridge supports cross-chain asset and data interoperability between various blockchain systems, while the zkDID is a scalable and interoperable DID solution based on SBT and verifiable credentials using ZKP.
Cysic
Cysic has raised $6 million in seed round led by Polychain Capital with participation from other investors on February 17th, 2023. Cysic is a hardware acceleration project focused on reducing ZK proof generation time for zk-based systems. ZK proof generation is a time-consuming process that requires significant computation, making it unacceptable for most ZK projects, especially scaling projects. Cysic aims to provide a full suite of ASIC hardware acceleration solutions for the ZKP generation, including MSM, NTT, and other components. Cysic's POC design work for a FPGA-based MSM acceleration solution has demonstrated an overwhelming performance advantage and the team plans to follow a two-phase development strategy. There are project development delay risks and market risks for ASIC-based ZK hardware acceleration projects, but Cysic has already partnered with several leading ZK projects and is poised to provide hardware acceleration services through SaaS APIs or selling hardware.
Space ID
Space ID has raised $10 million in strategic round led by Polychain Capital and Dao5 with participation from other investors on February 7th, 2023. SPACE ID is a company that aims to build a universal name service network for decentralized identities. It recently received funding from Polychain Capital and other investors, which will enable the company to accelerate the development of its universal name service and expand its team. SPACE ID's .bnb Domain Public Registration gained 370,000 registrations and 175,000 unique domain holders in the past 6 months and has secured integrations with over 100 leading projects and protocols. The company plans to launch its .arb domain pre-registration soon after merging with ARB ID. SPACE ID's goal is to provide a one-stop identity platform for web3 domains, as well as a multi-chain name service for everyone to easily create a web3 identity.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/polychain-capital/investor_financials