Avail, a startup building an infrastructure layer that aims to streamline the rollup experience, today announced a $27 million seed round led by Founders Fund and Dragonfly.
Cofounder Anurag Arjun told Fortune that although blockchain is not yet ready for mainstream usage, the key to reaching that pathway will be rollups: “The rollup-centric future for scaling blockchains is already here.”
Rollups are layer-2 blockchains designed to scale a network. By processing transactions away from the main blockchain, costs are reduced and a chain’s capacity avoids congestion-induced delays.
Avail is betting that Web3’s future will rely on tens of thousands of blockchains, each needing to interact with one another seamlessly—or risk a fragmented user experience. A core part of this growth will come from the multiplying of rollups, Arjun explained.
“This is why it’s imperative to lay the groundwork for the unified future of Web3, by building a unification framework where platforms are united rather than segmented,” he added.
Avail’s founders are both Polygon veterans. Arjun cofounded the blockchain, which is a layer-2 for the most popular commercial blockchain Ethereum, and Prabal Banerjee led research. Both are now planning to use Avail’s latest capital raise to accelerate the development of three core products: the foundational Data Availability 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, but the company plans to begin with rollups in the Ethereum ecosystem.
“Rollup tooling will mature to such an extent that it will be as easy to deploy an app-specific rollup as it is to deploy a smart contract today,” Arjun added.
To meet this demand, DA, Avail’s flagship product, provides a modular layer built with validity proofs and data availability sampling. The result is a foundational layer that unifies the various chains, the company said in a statement. Avail has spent three years working on the DA layer, which is expected to launch in the second quarter of this year, after which the Nexus and Fusion layers will be built out.
“By decoupling the different layers of the blockchain, Avail unlocks orders-of-magnitude scalability improvements, and helps solve the current fragmentation issues in the space,” Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, said in a statement.
