Avail, a blockchain that aims to help other blockchains scale, today announced a $43 million Series A round led by Founders Fund, Dragonfly, and Cyber Fund. Adding to its pre-seed and seed raises, its funding now totals $75 million.
Avail's customers are layer-2s, meaning blockchains like Base, Polygon, Arbritrum, or Opitmism that assemble batches of transactions and write them to a primary, or layer-1, chain. Avail provides services specifically for rollups, which are a type of layer-2 designed to scale networks. By processing transactions away from the main blockchain, rollups ensure that costs are reduced and a chain avoids congestion-induced delays.
Cofounder Anurag Arjun told Fortune that Web3’s success will rely upon each of the tens of thousands of blockchains interacting with one another seamlessly—or risk a fragmented user experience. Both Arjun and cofounder Prabal Banerjee are blockchain veterans, having met while working at Polygon, a popular layer-2 that's now compatible with Avail.
“There are hundreds of rollups, and it’s a very fragmented ecosystem. So, we’re building a way to unify [them] together, so that users don't need to deal with the complexity of the infrastructure,” said Arjun.
There are essentially two components to what Ethereum offers to a layer-2: data availability and settlements. Rollups atop Avail will keep settlements on Ethereum, but Avail hopes to replace the data availability side of things.
The company plans to use the $75 million it's 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 unifying infrastructure layer that, in theory, will be compatible with a wide variety of chains. However, the company plans to begin with rollups in 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 create a new protocol (across all categories of crypto) leveraging Avail's tech stack,” Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, said in a statement.
