Caldera Secures $15 Million in Series A Funding

Caldera, a web3 infrastructure platform, helps developers launch Ethereum rollups or scaling networks “with a single click.” It has successfully raised $15 million in a Series A funding round.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led this funding round, with contributions from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, Arkstream Capital, Lattice, and others, as announced by Caldera on Wednesday. The startup, based in the U.S., began its fundraising efforts in May and concluded by the end of that month, according to co-founder and CEO Matt Katz.

Katz did not provide details regarding the round’s structure, valuation, or any board seat arrangements for investors. With the completion of this Series A round, Caldera’s total funding reaches $25 million, following a previous raise of $10 million last year.

What is Caldera?

Caldera offers a rollup-as-a-service that aids developers in swiftly launching application-specific chains using tech stacks like Optimism’s OP Stack, ZKsync’s ZK Stack, Arbitrum Nitro, and Polygon CDK.

The platform claims to have assisted over 50 projects in launching their rollups, including Manta Pacific, Injective, ApeChain, Plume Network, Kinto, RARI Chain, and Zero Network by Zerion. These rollups collectively hold over $800 million in total value locked and have executed more than 59 million transactions across 1.7 million unique wallets.

“Caldera addresses two vital markets: established projects launching their own rollups and new teams lacking the capital or infrastructure to build their own chains from scratch,” said Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund. “This enables developers to focus on their core products while Caldera manages the underlying infrastructure.”

Caldera’s Plans

With the recent funding, Caldera is developing a project called “Metalayer,” aimed at integrating the fragmented Layer 2 and Layer 3 ecosystem. “Metalayer will enhance the developer experience for multi-rollup dApps, helping web3 teams leverage shared network effects while achieving better scalability, efficiency, and security,” Katz mentioned. “We anticipate that Metalayer will unlock new possibilities for innovative dApp, network, and token designs within the Ethereum rollup ecosystem.”

When prompted about potential plans for launching its own token, Katz mentioned, “We do not have any plans for a token at this time.”

Anirudh Pai, a partner at Dragonfly, expressed that “Metalayer brings us closer to the end-game of blockchain scalability and will crucially oxygenate the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Caldera currently has 14 employees, and Katz is seeking to expand the team in various roles, including product, design, and engineering. Katz and co-founder, CTO Parker Jou, dropped out of Stanford in 2022 from their computer science program to launch Caldera.

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