Helius raises $9.5 million Series A round to expand platform for developers on Solana

Helius, a vertically integrated developer platform that helps crypto applications build on Solana, today announced the close of its $9.5 million Series A round.

The round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Reciprocal Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One, and Propel, among others.

Helius’ stated mission is to eliminate Solana’s complexities for developers, improving the entire network from the bottom up. The company was founded in 2022 by former software engineers from Coinbase and Amazon Web Services. The platform offers a suite of tools that enable developers to quickly and easily build applications on Solana.

Since its launch, Helius has grown to power the majority of the Solana ecosystem, helping developers navigate events such as the Jupiter airdrop and Helium's migration to Solana, while powering enterprise integrations like Discord and Shopify, the company said in a statement.

“Helius has been committed to the Solana ecosystem since day one,” Craig Burel, a partner at Reciprocal Ventures, said in a statement.

Solana, one of the 10 largest layer-1 blockchains, boasts lower latency than competitors and previously has been dubbed an "Ethereum killer." Its SOL token climbed over 400% in 2023 to become the fifth-largest, whereby comparison ETH rose a more modest 66%.

But, Helius notes, as Solana has scaled up, one result has been developers grappling with complex infrastructure issues, such as lower-level blockchain integrations, as opposed to focusing on improving the applications themselves. “We want to build on top of that and abstract everything away from the developers," Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz told Fortune.

Mumtaz says it's these scaling issues that have slowed the development of crypto applications for everyday users. “It's been too difficult to build applications that are cheap, scalable, and fast,” he said, while also adding that he believes Solana is the first major network potentially to achieve this. "It just fits the bill for building these applications the best right now."

While at Coinbase, Mumtaz noticed that building an exchange to support all chains created friction. “You tend to spread yourself too thin because each blockchain is its own culture, ecosystem, and technical architecture,” he told Fortune. “We don't add RPC nodes and then go to Ethereum and Bitcoin."

By contrast, a horizontal approach often results in poorly built dapps and underperforming chains, Liam Vovk, CTO of Helius, said in a statement. Helius is “committed to doubling down on Solana and vertically integrating through the entire stack, from the validator plugins all the way up to open-source developer SDKs."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com