Foresight Ventures Participated in Shardeum's $18.2 Million Seed Round To Tackle Blockchain Scalability

October 18, 2022 — Shardeum, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based sharded blockchain which enables infinite scalability and atomic cross-shard composability, announced $18.2 million in the blockchain’s first seed round funding today. The round includes over 50 investors with prominent ones such as Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, and Foresight Ventures as well as other notable strategic investors including CoinGecko Ventures, Wemade, ZebPay, Jsquare, MH Ventures, Nestcoin, Veris Ventures, Tupix Capital, Mapleblock Capital, and NetZero Capital. Many influential angel investors participated in the round, including Balaji Srinivasan, Mayur Gupta (CMO at Kraken), Michael Montero (Co-founder at Resy — Acq. American Express and Co-Founder at CrowdTwist — Acq. Oracle), Pankaj Gupta (VP Engineering at Coinbase), Harsh Rajat (Co-founder at Push Protocol), Nakul Gupta (Lead PM at Coinbase NFT Marketplace & Institutional Onboarding), Ajeet Khurana (Founder at Reflexical), Ravi Adusumalli (GP at Elevation Capital), Rohan Chauhan (Digital assets at Hudson River Trading), Ganesh Swami (Co-founder at Covalent), Kashif Raza (Founder at Bitinning), and more.

Shardeum is a proof-of-stake smart contract platform that offers vastly improved scaling capability when compared to other Layer-1 blockchains like Ethereum. The blockchain uses dynamic state sharding technology, which allows it to linearly scale and increase TPS (transactions per second) with every node added to the network, ensuring that the network can maintain low gas fees indefinitely. A significant hurdle for developers within the current blockchain ecosystem is that existing sharded blockchains don’t allow for atomic composability across shards. Shardeum has designed a novel architecture that allows for atomic cross-shard composability to resolve the UX issues developers and users face in current sharded blockchains.

Shardeum’s founders, Nischal Shetty, who founded India’s largest crypto exchange, WazirX, and Omar Syed, a blockchain architect who has helped companies including NASA, Yahoo, and Zynga build scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed systems, have laid out three guiding principles for the Shardeum blockchain. Much like the original intention of the Internet, Shardeum’s core ethos will be centered around being open, collaborative, and community-driven, in order to fully democratize accessibility to decentralization.

“The Blockchain Trilemma has been a difficult problem to solve, and scalability is the most significant factor that is preventing wider crypto adoption, especially in emerging markets like India,” said Shardeum co-founder Nischal Shetty. “The Web3 ecosystem has been on a massive growth spree. For Web3 to onboard 1 billion users in the next few years, we need a scalable L1 blockchain that ensures 1 cent fees forever while maintaining decentralization. Shardeum aims to make that happen.”

“Shardeum is here to solve scalability using dynamic sharding like no one else in the space. At Foresight, we support founders and builders like Niscal and Ömer, who have proven track records in building one of the largest exchange and distributed platforms and are continually pushing the boundaries. On top of that, we are very excited about how Shardum is building the future of web3 in an emerging market like India and we are more than happy to join this journey to build together!” said the investment manager of Foresight Ventures, Chelsea Jiang.

“I invested in Shardeum as I think they are trying an interesting approach to scaling, which increases TPS as more validation nodes are added,” said Balaji Srinivasan.

The funds raised will be allocated towards ramping up the company’s marketing efforts along with growing the development team to further enhance Shardeum’s dynamic sharding technology and ecosystem development, with special attention on product and design development. Funding will also go towards expanding the company’s research and marketing efforts. Over the next year, Shardeum will be actively hosting hackathons in India and the U.S. and providing a platform that incentivizes developers to build and grow the Shardeum ecosystem.

Foresight Ventures is expected to tap into the Shardeum blockchain to bring their network of global developers, and partners including wallets, exchanges, and reputable blockchain applications, as a value add-on. Also to further boost the on-chain activities, Foresight will co-host global hackathons and events with Shardeum in Asia and emerging markets to attract solid local builders as part of a plan for exponential market expansion.

About Foresight Ventures

Foresight Ventures is dedicated to backing the disruptive innovation of blockchain for the next few decades. We manage multiple funds: a VC fund, an actively-managed secondary fund, a multi-strategy FOF, and a private market secondary fund, with AUM exceeding $400 million. Foresight Ventures adheres to the belief of a “Unique, Independent, Aggressive, Long-Term mindset” and provides extensive support for portfolio companies within a growing ecosystem. Our team is composed of veterans from top financial and technology companies like Sequoia Capital, CICC, Google, Bitmain, and many others.

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About Shardeum

Shardeum is the world’s first EVM-based Layer 1 blockchain which uses sharding to increase TPS (transactions per second) with the addition of every new node while retaining atomic composability. Shardeum provides low gas fees forever while maintaining true decentralization and solid security through dynamic state sharding. Shardeum aims to accelerate the transition to Web 3.0 by providing a platform that enables decentralized user experiences that are better than centralized competitors at scale.

Website: https://shardeum.org/