Avail secures $43M in Series A for Web3 unification

Avail, led by a Polygon co-founder, raises $75 million to tackle Web3 challenges like fragmentation and data availability.

Modular blockchain base layer Avail has secured $75 million through several investment rounds, as venture capitalists recognize the need to address data availability issues across blockchains.

On June 4, Avail closed $43 million in a heavily oversubscribed Series A round, adding to its existing corpus of $32 million from previous pre-seed and seed rounds. Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, plans to continue directing the funds to build the permissionless unification layer for Web3.

“With this new capital, we are poised to accelerate our development, expand our global presence, and continue to address the most critical challenges facing Web3 today.”

Avail is headed by Arjun, a co-founder of Polygon, who aims to address three major challenges within the Web3 ecosystem: blockchain fragmentation, insufficient data availability (DA) and limited scalability.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Arjun explained how Avail DA solves data availability issues by moving data off-chain and verifying its availability, leveraging validity proofs, erasure coding, light clients and data availability sampling (DAS) to do so.

“Contrary to monolithic blockchain designs, which reduce the amount of block space available as demand increases, Avail’s DA layer can scale block space with demand — future-proofing appchains and rollups.”

The comeback of crypto VC funding

The Series A funding saw participation from major venture capital (VC) firms and angel investors, including Altos Ventures, Alliance DAO, Hashkey, Elixir Capital, Spark Digital Capital and RW3 Ventures, among others.

Through its blockchain unification efforts, Avail wants to foster partnerships and collaborations with other Web3 players. Developers can build and scale modern blockchain applications using Avail’s capability to spin up a new rollup rather than creating a separate layer 1.

Arjun told Cointelegraph that increasing the numbers of layer-1 and layer-2 blockchains can be detrimental to the space due to fragmentation and user confusion. He further believes that VCs are attracted to Avail’s vision of unification and “the (aforementioned) problems we’re tackling with our tech.” 

Increasing numbers of layer-1 and layer-2 blockchains can be detrimental to the space due to fragmentation and user confusion.

Related: BNB Chain to expand layer-2 ecosystem with new rollup service

The rollups inherit security from Avail’s base layer. The project plans to further bolster its security by allowing the restaking of multiple cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

Web3 unification use case

Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, a participating venture capital firm, highlighted how easy it is to create new protocols using Avail’s technology stack.

“Avail makes data availability — a historically costly problem for blockchains — much cheaper and more efficient with their innovative, custom-built approach.”

Avail’s roadmap includes building Avail Nexus, a unification layer built on Avail DA to improve cross-rollup operability and Fusion Security to ensure unified and shared security across the Avail ecosystem.