Peter Thiel's Founders Fund co-leads $43 million Series A for modular blockchain Avail

Avail, a modular blockchain project that spun out of Polygon last year, has raised $43 million in a Series A funding round ahead of its mainnet launch.

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Dragonfly and Cyber Fund co-led the round, Avail said Tuesday. Other investors included SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital, Chapter One, Foresight Ventures, Mirana Ventures, KR1, Alliance and Hashkey Capital. Many investors, including Founders Fund and Dragonfly, are repeat backers of Avail , increasing their investments in the project.

Avail's Series A funding round comes just three months after it raised $27 million in seed funding in February. At that time, The Block reported that Avail was raising another round of funding. The latest round brings Avail's total funding to $75 million, including a $5 million pre-seed round, co-founder Anurag Arjun told The Block in an interview.

Arjun said the Series A round was structured using a combination of SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) and SAFT (simple agreement for future tokens) and officially closed last week. He declined to comment on the valuation; Avail's fully diluted valuation was several hundred million dollars when it raised a seed round in February, a source told The Block at the time.

What is Avail?

Avail is a modular blockchain project that is building a "rollup-centric infrastructure," Arjun said, predicting that the blockchain industry will be dominated by rollups or Layer 2 networks in the future. "There will be a few base layers, like Ethereum and Avail, and then hundreds and thousands of rollups on top. Avail is building the infrastructure to support this rollup-centric future," Arjun said.

Specifically, Avail is developing three products: Avail DA (data availability layer), aimed at helping rollups like Arbitrum, Optimism and Starknet scale further and lower their transaction costs; Avail Nexus, a permissionless framework that connects multiple rollups or blockchains for better interoperability; and Avail Fusion Security, which will allow Avail to leverage existing mature assets such as bitcoin and ether to enhance its security, in addition to its native token AVAIL, through a process similar to restaking.

"Avail makes data availability — a historically costly problem for blockchains — much cheaper and more efficient with their innovative, custom-built approach," Joey Krug , partner at Founders Fund, said in a statement. "Their DA solution, paired with their Nexus interoperability layer and Fusion security layer, makes it super seamless and easy for teams to create a new protocol (across all categories of crypto) leveraging Avail's tech stack."

Avail mainnet and token launch

Avail DA is currently in its incentivized testnet phase and claims to have had 310 validators at its peak, nearly 110,000 total accounts created and 116 million transactions processed. The Avail DA mainnet is expected to launch in the next few weeks, along with the AVAIL token, Arjun said. The Nexus and Fusion Security products will be launched after the mainnet, Arjun added.

There are currently about 50 people working for Avail. With fresh funding in place, Arjun plans to hire a few more people but intends to keep the team lean for the foreseeable future.

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