Peter Thiel's Founders Fund leads $15 million Series A for Ethereum rollup deployment platform Caldera

Caldera, a web3 infrastructure platform that helps developers launch Ethereum ETH -1.36% rollups or scaling networks "with a single click," has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round.

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund led the round, with participation from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, Arkstream Capital, Lattice and others, Caldera said Wednesday. The U.S.-based startup began raising money for the Series A round in May and quickly wrapped up the round by the end of that month, co-founder and CEO Matt Katz told The Block. He declined to comment on the structure of the round, valuation, or whether any of the investors have taken a board seat, either advisory or directorial.

The Series A round brings Caldera's total funding to $25 million, with the firm having previously raised $10 million last year.

What is Caldera?

Caldera is a rollup-as-a-service platform that helps developers quickly launch their own application-specific chains based on tech stacks such as Optimism's OP -1.88% Stack, ZKsync's ZK -6.54% Stack, Arbitrum ARB -3.090% Nitro and Polygon MATIC -2.076% CDK.

Caldera says it has helped over 50 projects launch their rollups, including Manta Pacific, Injective , ApeChain, Plume Network , Kinto, RARI Chain and Zero Network by Zerion. These rollups collectively hold over $800 million in total value locked and have completed more than 59 million transactions across 1.7 million unique wallets, according to Caldera.

"Caldera is capturing two core markets: major existing projects looking to launch their own rollup, and new teams that may not have the capital or infrastructure to manually launch their own chain from scratch," Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, said in a statement. "This allows developers to focus on their core products while Caldera handles the underlying infrastructure."

Caldera's plans

With fresh funding in place, Caldera is now building "Metalayer," which aims to unify the fragmented Layer 2 and Layer 3 ecosystem. "Metalayer will deliver an improved developer experience for multi-rollup dapps, help web3 teams leverage shared network effects, and enjoy greater scalability, efficiency and security," Katz told The Block. "We expect the Metalayer to unlock new potential for novel dApp, network and token designs within the Ethereum rollup ecosystem."

When asked if Caldera plans to launch its own token in the future, Katz said, "We do not have any plans for a token at this time."

Anirudh Pai, partner at Dragonfly, said in a statement, "I believe the Metalayer brings us closer to the end-game of blockchain scalability and will crucially oxygenate the Ethereum ecosystem."

Caldera currently employs 14 people, and Katz is hiring for various roles, including product, design and engineering. Katz and his co-founder and CTO, Parker Jou, dropped out of Stanford in 2022, where they were studying computer science, to build Caldera.

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