Web3 Company Led by Former Meta Execs Raises $300 Million in Series B Funding

Mysten Labs, a Web 3 infrastructure company and developer of the yet-to-launch Sui Layer 1 blockchain, has announced the initial close of its $300 million (roughly Rs. 2,400 crore) Series B funding round. The Series B round was led by FTX Ventures, and included participation from new and existing investors like a16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sino Global, Dentsu Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, and O'Leary Ventures, among other investment funds and strategic partners. The fresh funding values the company at over $2 billion (roughly Rs. 15,900 crore).

The company will use the funds to continue building its core infrastructure to power Web 3 applications and scale the Sui ecosystem. It will also be expanding its global team, with an important emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region.

Company founders Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun and George Danezis are all former employees of Meta. All worked on the company's cryptocurrency wallet, Novi. Despite the fact that Novi and Diem never got off the ground, the industry perception is that this failure was due to no fault of the engineers who worked on the project.

Chief Technology Officer Sam Blackshear was a Principal Engineer at Novi, and is credited with creating Move, the coding language used by both Sui and Meta's ill-fated blockchain Diem (formerly known as Libra). Mysten's Chief Product Officer is former Novi Product Lead Adeniyi Abiodun; Chief Cryptographer Kostas Kryptos held the same role at Meta; and Chief Scientist George Danezis also worked on Novi and Diem.

Mysten Labs are not the only former Novi team members seeking to build the next big thing in blockchain. Former Novi co-workers Avery Ching and Mo Shaik have since moved on to form Aptos Labs.

To compound the similarities between the two projects, both Sui and Aptos are powered by Move — an open-source programming language developed by Meta, initially intended to support the abandoned stablecoin project Diem.

Earlier this year, Aptos conducted and found similarly generous investments. In March, the company raised $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,500 crore) in an investment round which included a16z, Katie Haun and FTX Ventures.

In July, it topped up the piggy bank with a further $150 million (roughly Rs. 1,196 crore) raise. Crunchbase confirms that the company has raised $350 million (roughly Rs. 2,790 crore), placing its working capital in the same region as Mysten Labs.