LayerZero Labs, which builds technology to help blockchain protocols communicate with one another, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $120 million in a funding round led by a16z crypto, a section of the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.
Now with a war chest of approximately $250 million, the blockchain interoperability firm is currently valued at $3 billion. More than 30 investors participated in the round, including Christie’s, Circle Ventures, OpenSea Ventures, Samsung Next, Sequoia Capital, OKX Ventures, and BOND.
“You have all of these blockchains that are isolated execution environments,” Bryan Pellegrino, cofounder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, told Fortune. “Some of them are fast and cheap. Some of them are slow and secure. Some of them are great at storage.”
Pellegrino and his cofounders decided to combat how fragmented the world of blockchains has become with LayerZero, which he calls a “messaging protocol,” or code that allows developers to send data from Ethereum to Solana, for example.
“There is no longer any question that the future of crypto and Web3 is multi-chain,” Ali Yahya, general partner at a16z crypto, said in a statement. “LayerZero is already handling more transactions to and from major ecosystems than the native bridges.”
The mammoth funding round is one of the largest for a crypto company in 2023, and the multibillion-dollar valuation of LayerZero Labs puts it in the rarified echelon of crypto giants like Coinbase, whose market capitalization was a little less than $15 billion as of Tuesday morning.
The rise of LayerZero is all the more impressive considering that the company only launched a little more than a year ago, according to Pellegrino, the CEO.
A college dropout turned professional poker player, Pellegrino became a repeat startup founder after the U.S. government banned online poker in 2011. Having studied computer science in college, he created a fantasy sports site, which he sold two years after its creation.
Then, his whirlwind entrepreneurial career continued as he worked for professional baseball teams, did independent research on machine-learning algorithms, and started yet another company. LayerZero Labs, which now has a staff of 42, is his and cofounder Ryan Zarick’s most recent venture.
While LayerZero Labs takes a fee for every piece of data sent through its messaging protocol, its significant stash of funding allows the company to look beyond pure profit margin, says Pellegrino.
He and Zarick plan to further establish dominance in the growing field of companies that offer developers methods to send data between different blockchains. (Competitors include Cosmos, which also brands itself as a layer-zero, or protocol through which different blockchains can send and receive data.)
“Our goal is to win and to capture all of the market share in the space,” Pellegrino told Fortune.
Specifically, he says LayerZero Labs will use its new injection of capital to expand its presence in Web3 gaming as well as in the Asia-Pacific region. The company currently has offices in Vancouver and Hong Kong.
