Caldera raises $9M to enable Web3 at scale
We’re excited to announce that Caldera has raised $9M in funding across two rounds, lead by Shaun Maguire at Sequoia Capital and Ani Pai at Dragonfly respectively. This funding will help us grow our team, build out partnerships and integration to support developers, and help make Caldera’s vision a reality, enabling anyone to deploy scalable, customizable blockchain rollups.
The Round
We’re incredibly thankful for our backers, which include Dragonfly and Sequoia Capital as leads, with participation from other incredible firms including Neo, 1kx, and Ethereal Ventures, plus a litany of angels from both Web2 and Web3.
Why Caldera?
Web3 is at an inflection point. Blockchains are eating the world: what was once a niche technology built purely to back "digital gold" is now the computational substrate for a plethora of applications: payment rails, digital-native financial products, virtual status symbols (hello bored apes!), social protocols, games, consumer technology and more.
But as more users onboard onto Web3, the cracks start to show, in the form of slow transactions and high fees. The Ethereum blockchain’s global computer can only process as many instructions per second as the Altair 8800 — a computer introduced in 1974! Other, newer chains are not much better.
The status quo involves thousands of decentralized applications all competing for scarce computational resources. This leads to not only expensive transactions, but the “pricing out” of certain categories of apps entirely — often the very types of apps that will lead to mass adoption, such as games or consumer apps.
Application developers have enough on their plate; they shouldn’t be spending months optimizing their code — and often cutting features — just to ensure that their application’s smart contracts can be run on a blockchain.
Enter Caldera
Caldera enables anyone to launch and run dedicated, performant layer-two blockchain “rollups”. Rollups are lightweight, highly-customizable blockchains that inherit security from another blockchain, such as Ethereum or Polygon. By giving each application its own “app-rollup”, Caldera grants them a dedicated lane for their app’s transactions, radically lowering transaction costs and enabling projects to de-risk from fee spikes and network outages.
But app-rollups are about more than just fast, cheap transactions. App-rollups empower developers to do so much more, including:
- customizable fee structures, or the removal of transaction fees entirely
- generating project revenue via transaction, bridge fees, or MEV
- adding support for other programming languages
This is just the beginning. Just as the internet is run on millions of servers worldwide, Web3 will outgrow its current set of blockchains. As the space matures, thousands of projects will elect to launch dedicated blockchains for their ecosystems, all powered by Caldera.
Want to deploy a Caldera Chain?
Try playing around with a temporary, testnet rollup. Check out our public proof-of-concept at dashboard.caldera.xyz, the first platform in the world that enables anyone to launch fully-featured, Ethereum-compatible rollups in a single click.
Caldera is already running several chains in production, on mainnet. If your project is interested in launching a production rollup, please get in touch or check out our website at caldera.xyz