Helius, which provides a suite of tools for developers on Solana, has raised $21.75 million to expand its app developer services. The announcement was posted on X Wednesday evening ET by Helius Co-Founder and CEO Mert Mumtaz.
The round was led by Haun Ventures and Founders Fund with support from venture capital firms 6MV, Foundation Capital, Chapter One, and Spearhead.
“There’s nothing more important for the future of crypto than enabling better, faster, and cheaper apps,” Mumtaz told Unchained. “With this raise, we have all the horsepower to make it happen.”
Helius tools make building on Solana easier for developers, who have historically struggled with Solana’s complex setups and steep learning curve. Solana requires developers to know Rust, which can be difficult to learn and has long compilation times, despite its significant benefits in terms of speed and memory safety. Ethereum, Solana’s primary competitor, by contrast, uses Solidity, an industry-standard programming language in blockchain. Solana has also proven difficult for developers to build on as they’ve struggled with lower-level blockchain integrations, unique naming conventions, and inconsistent error alerts.
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Helius’s tools include high-performance RPC Nodes, APIs, Webhooks, and Geyser Plugins for low-latency data streaming. Through a partnership with Light Protocol, Helius also released a ZK Compression tool which enables developers to maximize ledger space and save money on storage in June of this year.
Helius runs the top validator on Solana by amount of active stake, powering 3.41% of the ecosystem, with 0% fees. This surpasses validators run by Galaxy Digital, Coinbase, and Figment, each with fees between 5% and 8%. Enterprises such as Kraken, Coinbase, Exodus, Magic Eden, and Jupiter power their transactions using the validator.
“Over the last couple years we’ve met with many of the most ambitious builders on Solana and found that most relied on Helius to support critical parts of their application,” said Breck Stodghill, Partner at Haun Ventures.
Helius last raised in February of this year, garnering $9.5 million in a Series A investment round also led by Foundation Capital with participation from Reciprocal Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One, Propel, and several other firms.
Venture capital investment in crypto is still well below its peak in 2022, when firms invested $23.7 billion in crypto companies, according to Pitchbook. However, the market is showing signs of recovery, with crypto seeing $2.2 billion in investment by July of this year, on-track to beat 2023’s meager fundraising of just $2.6 billion total.
