Hemi Labs, a start-up co-founded by former Bitcoin core developer and co-founder of Bloq, Jeff Garzik, has raised $15 million in its first round of funding. Binance Labs, Breyer Capital and Big Brain Holdings led the round in the firm, which says it plans to combine the powers of Bitcoin and Ethereum into one “supernetwork.”
Hemi Labs launched in July at this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, touting a novel technology that integrates Bitcoin within an Ethereum Virtual Machine. The goal is to allow Ethereum’s smart contracts to communicate directly with Bitcoin, bridging a gap in the technology that has existed since its inception.
Co-founder Max Sanchez said the company plans to use these funds to build out Hemi’s engineering team, add more Bitcoin interoperability features and offer developers advanced customizability, as well as incentivization, grants and community adoption. Sanchez declined to share the company’s valuation.
Sanchez joined Garzik’s incubator program at Bloq in 2016 where he co-founded a company called VeriBlock. While that venture didn’t pan out, Sanchez rolled over the technology he developed into Hemi, which utilizes his novel consensus mechanism known as Proof-of-Proof.
“This is kind of the evolution of some of the technology we built there with Proof-of-Proof,” Sanchez said. “And then bringing that into a chain that makes sense in 2024 versus 2017.”
At the moment, Sanchez says the company is garnering the most excitement from web developers and computer scientists, but that he hopes it will soon appeal to a larger audience. He described Hemi as the perfect place for anyone who wants to do decentralized financing using Bitcoin and Ethereum assets.
Hemi is not the first company to try to bridge this gap. In July, a pair of startups called ByBit Web3 and Ignition announced a partnership to provide users with a DeFi-based way to integrate Bitcoin and Ethereum. Sanchez believes Hemi differs from those firms and others because it uses newer technology and transcends the two blockchains’ respective communities.
Additional investors in the round include Crypto.com, Web3 Ventures, Hyperchain Capital, Alchemy and SALT Fund, among others.
“The Hemi team has a clear and compelling vision for unlocking the programmability, portability, and potential of Web3” said Ted Breyer at Breyer Capital, an early investor in Facebook and Spotify. “With a distinguished track record, they are uniquely positioned to deliver.”
