Funding Roundup: Celestia’s raised $155M

The biggest raise this week came from Celestia. It announced a $100 million round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from 1kx, Syncracy Capital, Placeholder and Robot Ventures. 

The $100 million has brought the “project’s total amount raised to $155 million,” per a press statement. 

“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and chair of the Celestia Foundation.

Read more: Celestia, the first modular data availability network, launches on mainnet

“Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era — while keeping it verifiable and low latency.”

A16z made some waves this week as well, announcing its first investment into a decentralized science investment. 

The project, AminoChain, announced a $5 million seed round which was — of course — led by Andreessen Horowitz. 

“We believe that blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize almost any industry where transparency, security, and ownership are core and presents a tremendous opportunity to accelerate progress in healthcare and science,” said Arianna Simpson, an a16z general partner investing in Web3. 

According to its funding announcement — which also served as the project coming out of stealth — AminoChain seeks to give patients who donate bio-samples “the transparency to finally know what is happening with their donations to society.”

Read more from our opinion section: We need to decentralize science

The project is a “technology that connects enterprise medical institutions and on which healthcare applications can be built,” AminoChain said.

Other notable rounds: 

• Polymarket is reportedly mulling the raise of more than $50 million in new capital, per The Information.
• Initia announced a $14 million Series A led by Theory Ventures, with participation from Delphi Ventures and HackVC, among others. 
• Mawari Network said it raised over $10 million in strategic funding in a round led by Borderless, 1kx and Antfield. 
• Daylight announced a $6 million round led by Union Square Ventures and 1kx. Framework Ventures and Chapter One also participated in the round.

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