Vancouver blockchain tech startup LayerZero Labs is the latest Canadian company to join the country’s growing group of unicorns, as it raised $135 million that values LayerZero at $1 billion.
The round attracted commitments from big names in the crypto and FinTech industry. LayerZero’s financing was tri-led by notable venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and FTX Ventures, which is the fund launched by crypto exchange FTX. It also saw participation from Coinbase Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Tiger Global, Uniswap Labs, Dapper Labs, imToken, CoinFund, Polygon, Zokyo, and Gemini.
With its new injection of capital, LayerZero intends to accelerate its development of cross-chain decentralized applications.
Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO at LayerZero, posted a tweet that revealed Tom Brady and Justin Timberlake also took part in the financing.
Founded by Pellegrino, Ryan Zarick, and Caleb Banister in 2021, LayerZero is developing an omnichain interoperability protocol that unites decentralized applications across disparate blockchains. The problem that LayerZero is solving focuses on uniting liquidity across different chains, making it possible to transact in and out, and across networks with ease.
As the crypto ecosystem continues to generate a greater demand through gaming, NFT marketplaces, and media apps, LayerZero claims the infrastructure to support this cross-chain system has fallen short. This results in users, data, and liquidity fragmented across applications deployed on different chains.
Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and incubator of Binance, co-led LayerZero’s $6 million funding round last September with Multicoin Capital. LayerZero previously raised $2 million in seed funding in April with participation from Multicoin Capital and Sino Global Capital.
With its new injection of capital, LayerZero intends to accelerate its development of cross-chain decentralized applications.
LayerZero reached its $1 billion valuation amid Canada’s tech sector seeing a stampede of new unicorns in recent years. The country has more than 20 companies that surpassed that valuation, after the ecosystem struggled to get to that number in the past.
Feature image from Pierre Borthiry via Unsplash