Layer 1 blockchain startup Shardeum raises $18 million in seed funding

Shardeum is an EVM-based layer-1 blockchain project co-founded by Nischal Shetty, the founder of India-based cryptocurrency exchange WazirX.

Shardeum, an EVM-based layer-1 blockchain startup co-founded by WazirX founder Nischal Shetty, has raised $18.2 million in its seed funding round, the platform announced on Tuesday.

The seed round was at a $199 million valuation, Shetty said in a company blog post, noting that the funding funding initiative attracted more than 50 investors. He also shared the news on Twitter.

Shardeum has raised over $18M in seed funding from 50+ investors @ $199M

We painstakingly worked on ensuring a broad set of investors and these investors are operators themselves. They’ve been helping us all along.

Glad to have everyone on board 🚀#BuildWeb3 #Shardeum $SHM https://t.co/gojxGxzeHC

— Nischal (Shardeum) ⚡️ (@NischalShetty) October 18, 2022

Major VCs back Shardeum

Some of the VCs backing the startup are Jane Street, Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, CoinGecko Ventures, Cogitent Ventures, ZebPay and WeMade.

The round also attracted numerous angel investors, with the Shardeum co-founder saying that the startup chose to go with as many investors as possible as part of its pursuit of a decentralised outlook on its investor portfolio.

“For the round, we chose to have a large number of investors with over 40% of them being angels. With the focus on decentralisation, we wanted to maximise the distribution of SHM and not to have a select few investors that own a majority of tokens. Our cap table includes diverse global institutional, venture and angel investors that are motivated to support Shardeum’s success,” Shetty wrote in the blog post.

Funds to help advance Shardeum’s sharding technology

Shardeum, a proof-of-stake blockchain co-founded by Shetty and Omar Syed, uses sharding to offer a unique architecture for auto scalability, security and energy efficiency. 

Its such issues that Ethereum seeks to solve as it transitioned from proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

According to the Shardeum’s founders, the sharding technology provides for a network designed to better the systems currently in use across the sharded blockchains ecosystem. 

The network is “the first linearly scalable smart contracts platform that increases transactions per second (TPS) by adding more nodes,” according to details on its website.

The blockchain platform will use the funds to ramp up its marketing, work on its product and design and expand its research efforts. The team also plans to roll out hackathons across India, the United States and other parts of the world over the next year.

Other efforts will go into incentivising developers to build on the Shardeum blockchain as the ecosystem grows.