In a funding extravaganza, India-based Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development platform Polygon has raised $450 million from marquee investment firms, including Sequoia Capital India, Softbank Vision Fund II and Tiger Global have infused $450 million in Polygon, a decentralized scaling platform for Ethereum blockchain.
The blockchain startup claims that the money will allow the team to help scale Ethereum and accelerate the mass adoption of Web3 applications.
“Web3 builds on the early Internet’s open-source ideals, enabling users to create the value, control the network and reap the rewards. Ethereum, scaled by Polygon, will be the bedrock of this next stage in the Web’s evolution,” said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
In a statement announcing the fundraise, Naliwal added, “Technological disruption didn’t start with Web2, nor is it going to end there. That’s why we are very excited to see some of the same firms that funded the previous round of innovation now being our Web3 vision.”
The Web3 first movers of India
Before the $450 million investment in Polygon, the biggest investment in the web3 or cryptocurrency space in India was made in the trading platform CoinSwitch Kuber, where Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures led a $260 million round in October last year.
#Polygon is now backed by the best. It's truly reflective of the common vision of the many in making web3 the choice of the billions.#WAGMI💜https://t.co/LgG1OSRvEz
— Polygon | Aggregated (@0xPolygon) February 7, 2022
The blockchain startup is currently in the process of building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge and Polygon Avail, which is similar to what Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Web2 developers — a tool for every possible use case. The team is also investing in cutting-edge zero-knowledge (ZK) technology that will be key to onboarding the next billion users to Ethereum.
The web3 community in India has been growing exponentially, rising to prominence as 2021 saw a large-scale push to bring cryptocurrencies to mainstream attention. With developers’ increasing interest in building a wide variety of decentralized services, India has an interesting array of projects involving cryptocurrencies and other related areas in the works.
First major fund infusion after 2017
The funding round marks the first major Polygon funding round since 2017. The project’s native token, Polygon (MATIC), is the 15th largest crypto asset in market valuation. Year-to-date, MATIC has gained 3,608 percent against the US dollar, and, over the last week alone, MATIC has jumped 19.4 percent in value.
Managing director at Sequoia Capital India, Shailesh Lakhani, said, “The platform of choice to build on the blockchain today is Polygon. Thousands of developers across a range of applications are choosing Polygon and their complete set of scaling solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem.”
