Celestia Foundation secures $100m in new fundraising

Celestia Foundation, the Liechtenstein-based nonprofit that helped launch Celestia, has raised $100 million from major crypto-focused venture capital firms led by Bain Capital Crypto.

Announced on September 23, this fundraise brings the total amount raised so far for the Celestia (TIA) project to $155 million. The team behind the modular data availability blockchain network raised $55 million ahead of the project’s launch in October 2022.

This fundraising was jointly led by Bain Capital and Polychain Capital.

Syncracy Capital, Robot Ventures, 1kx, and Placeholder, as well as other venture capital firms and investors, also participated in the latest capital injection.

Celestia’s latest technical roadmap

The Celestia Foundation aims to support Celestia developers to bring high-throughput applications to the network. Specifically, the $100 million raise comes after Celestia’s core developer community announced the project’s technical roadmap.

Scalability is a key focus, with developers aiming to increase the throughput of the modular consensus network to rival Visa’s roughly 24,000 transactions per second. Reaching 1-gigabyte blocks would put Celestia on track for that goal, according to the technical roadmap.

“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled the block space from the dial-up era to the broadband era,”

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia.

Al-Bassam also noted that the new roadmap goes beyond simply scaling the block space further, and also focuses on ensuring verifiability and low latency.

Celestia launched its mainnet beta in October 2023 and has since undergone significant developments, including the deployment of aggregation chains and Blobstream, which allows Celestia’s data availability layer to be ported to Ethereum (ETH).

The platform has also partnered with Polygon Labs to integrate the DA layer into the Polygon Chain Development Kit.