Celestia Foundation secures $100m in new fundraising

Celestia Foundation, the Liechtenstein-based non-profit organization helping to build Celestia, has raised $100 million from major crypto-focused venture capital firms, led by Bain Capital Crypto.

Announced on Sept. 23, this fundraising brings the total amount raised for the Celestia (TIA) project to $155 million so far. The team behind the modular data availability blockchain network secured $55 million in October 2022 ahead of the project’s launch.

Bain Capital and Polychain Capital co-led that fundraising.

This latest capital injection attracted the participation of Syncracy Capital, Robot Ventures, 1kx, and Placeholder, among other VC firms and investors.

Celestia’s recent technical roadmap

The Celestia Foundation is looking to bolster Celestia developers as they bring high-throughput applications to the network. Notably, the $100 million raise comes on the back of Celestia’s core developer community announcing the project’s technical roadmap.

Scalability is a key focus, with developers aiming to increase the modular consensus network’s throughput to rival Visa’s roughly 24,000 transactions per second. According to the technical roadmap, achieving 1 gigabyte blocks will put Celestia on the path to this goal.

“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,”

Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia.

Al-Bassam also noted that the new roadmap goes beyond just scaling blockspace further. It is also focused on ensuring verifiability and low latency.

Celestia launched its mainnet beta in October 2023 and has seen notable developments since, including the deployment of rollup chains and Blobstream, which allows for the streaming of Celestia’s data availability layer to Ethereum (ETH).

The platform also partnered with Polygon Labs to integrate the DA layer with the Polygon Chain Development Kit.