Mysten Labs, a Web 3 infrastructure company and the yet-to-launch developer of Sui Layer 1 blockchain, has announced the initial close of its $300 million (roughly Rs. 2,400 crore) Series B funding round. The Series B round was led by FTX Ventures and included new and existing investors such as a16z Crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sino Global, Greens Venture, Dentsu. Capital, and O’Leary Ventures, among other investment funds and strategic partners. The new fund values the company at $2 billion (roughly Rs. 15,900 crore).
The company will use the funding to continue building its core infrastructure to power Web 3 applications and scale the needle ecosystem. It will also expand its global team with a significant focus on the Asia-Pacific region.
Company founders Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeni Abiodun and George Denezis are all former Meta employees. All worked on the company’s cryptocurrency wallet, Novy. Despite the fact that Novi and Diem never got off the ground, the industry believes that the failure was not due to any fault of the engineers working on the project.
Chief Technology Officer Sam Blackshear was the lead engineer at Novi and is credited with creating Move, the coding language used by both Sui and Meta’s ill-fated blockchain Dime (formerly known as Libra). Mysten’s Chief Product Officer is former Novy product lead Adeniyi Abiodun; Chief cryptographer Kostas Kryptos held the same role at Meta; And Chief Scientist George Denezis also worked on Novy and Diem.
Mysten Labs Former Novy team members aren’t the only ones looking to build the next big thing in blockchain. Former Novy colleagues Avery Ching and Mo Shaik then founded Aptos Labs.
To consolidate the similarities between the two projects, both Sui and Aptos are powered by Move – an open-source programming language developed by Meta, initially intended to support the abandoned stablecoin project Diem.
Earlier this year, Aptos organized and found similarly generous investments. In March, the company raised $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,500 crore) in an investment round that included a16z, KT Haun and FTX Ventures.
In July, it topped the piggy bank by raising another $150 million (roughly Rs. 1,196 crore). Crunchbase confirms that the company has raised $350 million (roughly Rs. 2,790 crore), putting its working capital in the same region as Mysten Labs.
