Blockchain startup from former Meta staff raises $36 million from Andreessen Horowitz

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested $36 million in Mysten Labs, a startup founded by former Meta employees (earlier Facebook).

We raised $36M in our first funding roundhttps://t.co/wATTZt3NYI

— MystenLabs (@Mysten_Labs) December 6, 2021

According to a16z's statement, Mysten is building “fundamental Web 3.0 infrastructure” to address scalability issues, as well as to accelerate the development and deployment of decentralized services.

Mysten Labs' CEO is Evan Cheng — in 2018 he moved from the head of the engineering affairs division at Facebook to the role of director of blockchain engineering.

He was joined by former company engineers Sam Blackshear and George Danezis, as well as the head of product for the Novi project, Adeni Abiodun.

“We are building infrastructure that, according to our previous research, will overcome many constraints,” Cheng said in a CNBC interview.

Earlier, the head of Meta's Payments divisionDavid Marcus announced his departure from the company. In 2018 he headed the new blockchain research group, and a year later he led the Libra project (later Diem).

In November, a16z led the Series A funding round for the music NFT-platform Royal $55 million.

In the same month the venture firm backed Forte, a startup providing blockchain solutions for game publishers.

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