Taiko, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution provider, just announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures, and Token Bay Capital. The close of its most recent round brings Taiko's total capital raised to $37 million across three rounds.

The closing of its Series A round comes just ahead of Taiko's highly-anticipated mainnet launch. Other notable participating investors in this latest round include Wintermute Ventures, Presto Labs, Flow Traders, Amber Group, OKX Ventures, GSR, WW Ventures, and more. 

Top Tier Investors

Lightspeed Faction, a blockchain-focused venture capital firm, recently launched its inaugural $285 million fund. Hashed is one of the largest crypto-focused venture funds and ecosystem builders in Asia, headquartered in South Korea. 

"Amongst an explosion of new Rollups, Taiko stands out due to its passionate community, paired with a based sequencing architecture, which uniquely simplifies the L2 value chain, streamlining trust assumptions and removing friction for developer adoption," said Samuel Harrison, Founding Partner at Lightspeed Faction.

"Hashed is profoundly impressed by Taiko's leadership in blockchain scalability with its Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup technology. The team's achievements, including vibrant community engagement and successful testnets, underscore our confidence in their vision," said Ryan Kim, Founding Partner at Hashed. 

Generative Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on investing in companies working on decentralized networks and machine intelligence. Token Bay Capital is renowned for its expertise in blockchain investment strategies.

Will Wang, the Managing Partner of Generative Ventures also added: "The scaling of Ethereum is an important prerequisite for the blockchain ecosystem to become the mainstream next-generation global financial system. Our continuous and firm support for Taiko demonstrated through three rounds of investment, reflects our recognition of Taiko's philosophy and execution."

More About Taiko?

Taiko is an Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup, scaling Ethereum by supporting all EVM opcodes in a Layer 2 architecture that is decentralized, permissionless, and secure.

Since it was founded in 2022, Taiko has successfully executed six testnets involving over 1,100,000+ unique wallets, 30,000+ proposers, and 14,000+ provers. There are over 100 live apps in the Taiko ecosystem today, supported by a vibrant community of 850,000+ members on Discord.

"Building the first Ethereum-equivalent-based rollup is something we knew was going to be a multi-year adventure," said Daniel Wang, Taiko's Co-Founder and CEO. "Now, as we approach the mainnet launch, we realize what a ride it has been. We're determined to ship our products as soon as they're ready and show the industry that what had been thought of as impossible, is indeed possible."

Final Thoughts

Taiko has conducted six testnets, each focused on different aspects of the protocol. In each of these testnets, Taiko received substantial support from hundreds of thousands of community members. These members contributed by building dapps, and operating nodes, serving as proposers and provers, and engaging with the protocol in various ways — all permissionless.

"Our commitment to scale Ethereum in the most native way possible is something investors and partners have been very keen to support," said Taiko's Co-Founder and COO Terence Lam. "We want to thank everyone who shares our vision and continues to support us in our journey to bring Ethereum to the world."

Taiko launched its 6th testnet, Katla, early this year. Katla is the first testnet to use Taiko's Based Contestable Rollup (BCR) design, a configurable, multi-proof rollup architecture that features a contestation mechanism and based sequencing. Katla serves as the foundation of Taiko's upcoming mainnet launch.

In the future, Taiko will develop Based Booster Rollup (BBR), a design that tackles the liquidity fragmentation issue by allowing developers to deploy on Ethereum and scale natively across all L2s.