India's Shardeum Closes $18.2M Seed Funding Round, Valuation at $199M

India-based Shardeum ended its $18.2 million seed funding, raising a valuation of $199 million.

According to Sharedeum, co-founded by Indian exchange WazirX's founder and blockchain architect Omar Syed, the seed round had over 50 investors who participated, including Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, Jane Street and Foresight Ventures.

The funding round was conducted through a private token sale, and the company is expected to launch in the first quarter of next year and will later stage a public token sale. 

Balaji Srinivasan, former chief technology officer of Coinbase, said, "I invested in Shardeum as I think they are trying an interesting approach to scaling, which increases TPS as more validation nodes are added."

In comparison, Shardeum's $18 million raise is an adequate size for a seed round in the third quarter of the year as the amount is closer to the average Series A check size, which comes in at $22.8 million.

According to the company, the new funds will be used for increased marketing efforts and upgrading the development team.

In order to provide incentives to developers to build on the ecosystem, Shardeum plans to host hackathons in India and the US.

Previously, the startup announced that it aimed to raise $18 million at a $200 valuation in August.

The company is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform. It uses dynamic state-sharding technology in pursuit of efficiency gains and to scale the network. 

Sharding also further helps split blockchain infrastructure into smaller pieces. It helps increase block space for more transactions and reduces gas fees. 

According to the company's announcement, the system has been designed to eliminate user experience issues faced by users and developers of existing and shared blockchains.

Shetty said in a statement, "the blockchain trilemma has been a difficult problem to solve, and scalability is the most significant factor, preventing wider crypto adoption, especially in emerging markets like India."

He added, "the web3 ecosystem has been on a massive growth spree. For web3 to onboard 1 billion users in the next few years, we need a scalable L1 blockchain which ensures 1 cent fees forever while maintaining decentralization. Shardeum aims to make that happen."