Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Co-Leads $27M Seed Round for Modular Blockchain Project Avail

Avail, a modular blockchain project spun off from Polygon last year, raised $27 million in a seed funding round co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Dragonfly.

Other investors participating in the round included SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital, Nomad Capital and several unidentified angel investors, Avail said Monday.

Anurag Arjun, co-founder of Avail, declined to comment on the round structure and valuation, but a source with knowledge of the matter said the round was structured as a simple agreement for future tokens and gave Avail a fully diluted valuation of several hundred million dollars.

Arjun said Avail is currently raising another round of funding, so “we are unable to disclose the valuation prior to completion” and cannot comment on “the structure and FDV at this stage.”

Avail began operations within Polygon in late 2020 and was funded by Polygon’s cash flow until March 2023, when it became an independent entity separate from Polygon. As its mainnet launch approaches, Avail has raised external funding.

What is Availability?

Avail is a modular blockchain project aimed at streamlining the rollup experience, as it believes that many rollups, including application-specific ones, will power the scalability of the blockchain.

“Rollups extend execution by taking computation off-chain, but the growth of rollups places substantial demands on Ethereum when it comes to data availability,” Arjun told The Block. “It will take a few years for Danksharding to be fully implemented, which means that the Ethereum blobspace must be scaled using an enabled, responsive and scalable data availability layer, proofed validity. That’s what Avail DA solves,” he said.

DA is the first of Avail’s “Trinity” offerings. The other two are Nexus and Fusion Security. Nexus enables a permissionless verification center that will unify rollups, leveraging Avail DA as the root of trust, Arjun said. Fusion Security, on the other hand, will take native assets from the most mature ecosystems, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and enable them to bring additional security to the Avail ecosystem, Arjun added.

Fusion Security looks like a restore. Arjun said that he indeed took inspiration from EigenLayer, Babylon and Osmosis. However, Avail Fusion Security differs from these projects because “it borrows economic security from other assets but penalizes both security and liveness failures in the Avail consensus,” he said.

Modular projects are gaining popularity

Modular blockchain projects are gaining popularity, especially after the launch of Celestia late last year. Earlier this month, modular projects Lava and Inco also raised funds.

When asked how Avail is different from other modular projects, Arjun said that aside from technical differences, other projects focus on a single component of modularity, such as availability or access to data . “Avail products focus on a much broader scope and exist to alleviate the fragmentation of the user experience that comes with the proliferation of rollups,” he said.

Avail’s technology stack allows for “a more modular design space” for projects building on its infrastructure, Founders Fund partner Joey Krug said in a statement. “By decoupling the different layers of the blockchain, Avail unlocks orders of magnitude scalability improvements and helps solve current fragmentation issues in the space,” Krug added.

Avail DA is currently in testnet and the mainnet is expected to launch around April, Arjun said. Meanwhile, the first iteration of Nexus will launch later this year, and Fusion Security should be up and running next year, he added.

Avail currently has 43 people, with the core team based in Dubai, and Arjun is looking to hire more people in roles such as engineering and business development.

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