Caldera Secures $15M Series A Funding Round to Build the Metalayer, the Largest Rollup Ecosystem
San Francisco, United States, July 24th, 2024, Chainwire
With support from notable investors including Founders Fund, Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, and Lattice Fund, Caldera aims to transform blockchain scalability and interoperability.
Caldera, the largest rollup ecosystem helping projects deploy their own blockchains on popular stacks with a single click and ensuring ongoing reliability and security, today announced it has raised its $15 million Series A led by Founders Fund with participation from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, Arkstream Capital, Lattice, among others. This latest round of funding brings Caldera’s total capital raised to $25 million. Caldera will use the funds to advance its Metalayer, a unified rollup network. This network integrates with the largest rollup ecosystem, benefiting from network effects to improve efficiency, security, and scalability.
Many blockchain projects face growing challenges in deploying and maintaining rollups due to the high costs, slow processes, and risks associated with hiring protocol and site reliability engineers. Caldera solves this by enabling projects to deploy a rollup with a single click, eliminating the need for an in-house engineering team. Caldera handles everything from deployment to ongoing maintenance, ensuring best security practices, low fees, customization options, and 99.99% uptime SLAs.
Founded in 2022 by Matt Katz, CEO, and Parker Jou, CTO, Caldera’s founders met while studying computer science at Stanford University and have since garnered experience from top tech companies such as Nvidia, Apple, Waymo, and Skiff. The leadership team includes experts from leading web3 and traditional technology companies including Coinbase, Google, Scale AI, Jump Trading, and Amazon.
“Revolutionizing rollup deployment is the next step in achieving a truly scalable and decentralized blockchain ecosystem,” said Matt Katz. “While building and growing Caldera to become the leading rollup ecosystem, we have identified interesting new gaps in the space that we aim to fill with the Metalayer. Our goal is to unify the Ethereum ecosystem by providing seamless interoperability between various rollup frameworks.”
Through its Metalayer network, Caldera provides web3 teams with a suite of tools for launching high-performance, customizable, application-specific rollups. The project uses frameworks like Arbitrum Nitro, Optimism’s OP Stack, ZKsync’s ZK Stack, and Polygon CDK, bringing major stacks together for a unified developer experience. By integrating core ecosystem projects and L2s into its technology, Caldera is helping to broaden the adoption and use of the Ethereum blockchain.
“As the crypto space has evolved, it’s now mature enough to support developers being able to pick and choose their own modular stack, much in the same way the web evolved away from monolithic infrastructure to more modular services based ones in the cloud. With Caldera, developers can do things like choose their own DA layer, execution layer, and settlement layer for their rollup or chain. I believe this is the future of how protocols and apps will be built in the space, and Caldera is at the forefront of it. This allows developers to focus on their core products while Caldera handles the underlying infrastructure,” said Joey Krug, Partner at Founders Fund. “Caldera is capturing two core markets: major existing projects looking to launch their own rollup, and new teams that may not have the capital or infrastructure to manually launch their own chain from scratch. We’ve gotten to know their outstanding team over the past year and we look forward to continuing to support their mission.”
Currently, Caldera supports over 50 rollups with 1.7 million unique wallets holding over $800 million in total value locked and completing more than 59 million transactions. Notable chains include Manta Pacific, ApeChain, Treasure, Plume Network, Towns, Kinto, RARI Chain, and Zero Network by Zerion.
“I am very impressed by Caldera’s ability to innovate and execute at what I believe is the bleeding-edge of rollup design.” said Anirudh Pai, a partner at Dragonfly. “I believe the Metalayer brings us closer to the end-game of blockchain scalability and will crucially oxygenate the Ethereum ecosystem.”
To learn more about Caldera’s platform offerings and stay up to date on its latest news, users can visit caldera.xyz or visit its X at @Calderaxyz.
About Caldera
Caldera is one of the fastest-growing rollup ecosystems on Ethereum, empowering web3 teams to launch high-performance, customizable, application-specific rollups. With over 50 modular rollups in its network, Caldera powers an ecosystem of unified rollups that share collective network effects and enjoy greater efficiency, scalability, and security. Leading Caldera chains like Manta, Apechain, Kinto, Injective, RARI Chain and Zero Network by Zerion benefit from its dedicated support for builders and robust coordination mechanisms. Caldera’s Metalayer is the connective tissue between rollups on the Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and ZK stacks. As an omnichain, all-purpose abstraction layer for rollups utilizing different frameworks, the Metalayer enables unparalleled interoperability while streamlining the developer experience, making it possible for Ethereum to be truly web-scale. Caldera has raised $25 million from leading investors, including Founders Fund, Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, and Lattice.
For more information, users can visit Caldera’s website.