Blockchain developer Movement Labs locks in $38m, Polychain Capital leads VC round

Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain developer, raised $38 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital. 

The funding is expected to support its mission to integrate Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine into Ethereum (ETH). This would address vulnerabilities in smart contracts and improve transaction speed, the company stated.

The funding round attracted investments from well-known venture capital firms like Hack VC, Placeholder, Figment Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Aptos Labs, among others.

According to Movement Labs, between 2022 and 2023, the Ethereum ecosystem experienced losses totaling more than $5.4 billion due to smart contract exploits.

The startup’s Move-EVM product is designed to prevent such attacks by allowing developers to deploy code that undergoes real-time verification, effectively blocking attack vectors like reentrancy. 

Move is a Rust-based programming language developed by Facebook for its Diem blockchain crypto payment project, which was discontinued in 2022.

It was designed to work on any platform and provides a framework for writing secure smart contracts used in cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized applications (apps).

Movement Labs’ Busy Year

Movement Labs has been promoting the adoption of Move since securing a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023.

Key contributors to the fund included Varys Capital, the Avalanche Fund by Blizzard, dao5, Borderless Capital, and others within the Wormhole developer ecosystem.

Angel investors who participated include Chandler Song, Ryan Fang, and Stanley Wu from Ankr, as well as George Lampeth from dao5, and Calvin Liu from Eigenlayer.

The money from the pre-seed round was also meant to introduce the Movement SDK, a tool aimed at making it easier to create secure and high-performing Move environments for established blockchains.

Additionally, earlier this year, Movement Labs partnered with Covalent (CQT), a multichain indexer with integration across 225 chains, to bring real-time data indexing and deployment tools, including Covalent’s Unified API and GoldRush Kit, into the Movement ecosystem. 

Covalent’s Unified API offers seamless access to real-time and historical blockchain data, making it a vital tool for AI in web3. The GoldRush Kit enhances the user experience by providing a user-friendly interface for accessing and visualizing historical blockchain data within the Movement Labs ecosystem.