Polygon raises $450 mn from Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank, Galaxy, Tiger, Republic Capital

Polygon, a blockchain network that serves as a support layer to Ethereum, has raised about $450 million through a private sale of its native MATIC token in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India 

This is Polygon’s first major financing round since the project’s founding in 2017

SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital and prominent investors like Alan Howard (co-founder, Brevan Howard) and Kevin O’Leary, Alameda Research, Transcend Fund, Makers Fund, Animoca Brands, Scopely, dune ventures, Union Square Ventures, Seven Seven Six, Elevation Capital, Sino Global Capital, DCG, Standard Crypto, Celsius, Dragonfly Capital, Variant Fund, Blue Pool Capital, WorkPlay Ventures , Third Point and  Steadview Capital among others also participated in the funding round.

“With this warchest, the core team can secure Polygon’s lead in paving the way for mass adoption of Web3 applications, a race that we believe will result in Ethereum prevailing over alternative blockchains. The funds will also allow Polygon to continue investing in cutting-edge zero knowledge (ZK) technology that will be key to onboarding the next billion users to Web3,” said Polygon in its blog.

“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. 

"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," he added.

Ethereum’s most pressing question is how to increase the network’s capacity to handle more transactions. The skyrocketing popularity of new applications in decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) brought with it congestion and soaring fees. Polygon has stepped in with a broad range of scaling options and transaction rates that are among the industry’s lowest.

Polygon team is building a complete suite of solutions that is similar to what Amazon Web Services offers Web2 developers -- a tool for every possible use case and scaling at a click of a button.

"For Web3, Polygon PoS already offers an execution layer with low fees and high transaction throughput secured by the Ethereum mainnet.  With Polygon Edge, projects are building custom blockchains from scratch. In the near future, Polygon Avail will deliver the general-purpose, scalable data availability piece of the puzzle and ZK solutions will make network congestion a thing of the past first and then tackle applications around privacy," says the company blog.

“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,” said Shailesh Lakhani, MD at Sequoia India. “This is an ambitious and aggressive team, one that values innovation at its core. Sequoia Capital India is thrilled to lead this significant financing round.”