Helius Empowers Solana Developers with $9.5M in New Funding

Helius, the platform revolutionizing the development of high-performance crypto applications on Solana, has announced a successful $9.5 million Series A funding round. Led by Foundation Capital, the round saw participation from an impressive lineup of investors including Reciprocal Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One, Propel, and key figures from the Solana ecosystem such as Balaji Srinivasan, Anatoly Yakovenko, Raj Gokal, and Kyle Samani.

In addressing the challenges faced by developers on the Solana blockchain, Helius aims to streamline the creation of applications. The platform provides a suite of tools that simplifies the development process, allowing creators to focus on user experience and application functionality. This initiative comes as a response to the difficulties in scaling transactions and maintaining speed on the blockchain, which have previously led developers to allocate significant resources towards building infrastructure rather than the applications themselves.

Helius’s commitment to enhancing the Solana development landscape is evident in the words of its CEO, Mert Mumtaz. “The biggest criticism of crypto to date has been the lack of useful applications that benefit everyday people. Most of the focus has been on speculation instead of tangible things producing real value. To change this, we need to make it as simple as possible for developers to build apps that are cheap, fast, and scalable. And this is the mission of Helius. We simplify and enhance the experience for developers on the highest-performing chain—Solana—by giving them the platform they need to build the best possible dApps in crypto. With our world-class team and investors, we are excited to advance our mission and help increase the probability of a crypto future,” Mumtaz remarked, highlighting the platform’s objectives.

Liam Vovk, CTO of Helius, also shared insights into the company’s strategic direction, emphasizing a vertically integrated approach to solving the Solana ecosystem’s challenges. “Most infrastructure providers in crypto build horizontally across chains and simply add an RPC and move on to a new chain. As we’ve learned, this approach often results in poorly built dApps and underperforming chains. Our team at Helius is committed to doubling down on Solana and vertically integrating through the entire stack, from the validator plugins all the way up to open-source developer SDKs. In this way, we are effectively removing barriers for forward-thinking developers and shaping the future of Web3,” Vovk explained.

Founded by former Coinbase software engineer Mert Mumtaz and ex-Amazon Web Services software engineers Liam Vovk and Nicolas Pennie during the 2022 crypto bear market, Helius has quickly positioned itself as a pivotal player in the Solana development space. The Series A funding will be directed towards expanding the team with low-level systems and backend engineers and enhancing Helius’s technical stack, further solidifying its mission to simplify and improve the Solana network’s capabilities from the ground up.