Former Meta employees’ startup Mysten Labs raises $300m from FTX Ventures and other investors

Founded by a team of former Meta employees, Mysten Labs closed a Series B funding round of $300 million at a valuation of $2 billion. The funds will be used to build foundational infrastructure and accelerate the adoption of the Sui blockchain.

📢: Today, we’re excited to announce our $300M Series B funding round. This milestone signals the technical strength & immense potential of our Sui ecosystem. #Suinami🌊 1/🧵 pic.twitter.com/wQ8WH1egyY

— Sui by Mysten Labs (@Mysten_Labs) September 8, 2022

The firm aims to grow its team and push expansion in the Asia-Pacific region.

The round was led by FTX Ventures. Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, Andreessen Horowitz, Circle Ventures, Binance Labs, O’Leary Ventures and others also participated.

Investors will receive equity stakes as well as warrants on their own tokens.

Sui will be based on the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm and will use transaction parallelization to achieve high throughput, low latency, and low fees.

The project also aims to address challenges in customer acquisition, developer engagement and expanding the range of use cases.

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, co-founder and CEO Mysten Labs Evan Cheng said that the current Web3 infrastructure is reminiscent of the modem era — “slow, costly, limited, not secure and simply hard to build.”

In 2018, Cheng moved from leading Facebook’s engineering division to the role of director of blockchain engineering.

Joining Mysten Labs’ co-founders were former engineers Sam Blakshir and George Danesis, as well as Novi project’s head of product Adeni Abiodun.

In December 2021, the startup raised $36 million.

Earlier, Aptos, the team behind the ‘scalable blockchain for billions of people’, closed a Series A round of $150 million.

The founders previously worked on the Diem project (formerly Libra) from Facebook.

Follow ForkLog’s bitcoin news on our Telegram — cryptocurrency news, prices and analytics.