Boba Network has now entered unicorn status with a valuation more than $1.5 billion from a recent funding round without a lead investor.
Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Boba Network recently raised $45 million in a Series A funding round. According to reports, there was no lead investor for the exercise – Boba’s first-ever funding round. The Series A round, gives the scaling and augmenting solution project a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Participating investors in the funding round were Crypto.com, Huobi, BitMart, Kinetic Capital, Infinite Capital, Hack VC, Will Smith-led Dreamers VC, and M13 Ventures. Additionally, other crypto-focused venture funds such as Hypersphere, IOST, and ROCK Capital, also constituted the investor pool. The list also includes some crypto industry founders such as Origin Protocol, The Graph, and FEI Labs.
According to founder Alan Chiu in a media session, the Boba Network funding round was realized via a token sale (BOBA). However, he did not provide specific terms of the token sale. Notwithstanding, suggestions indicate that investors procured the BOBA token at a price exceeding its current market price of $1.50.
Interestingly, BOBA hit a record high of around $8 last November. It is also worth noting that BOBA currently has a fully diluted valuation of about $740 million. According to Chiu, Boba concluded the funding round in the fourth quarter of last year.
New Funding Planned for Internal Capacity Expansion
With its newly-minted status as a ‘unicorn’ company ($1 billion or more in valuation) and fresh capital in hand, Boba wants to scale up. The platform plans to grow its team and onboard more developers. At the moment, Boba has a headcount of more than 30 people. Nonetheless, Chiu suggests that this number will double by the end of the year.
Furthermore, the project’s founder revealed several plans to grow the platform’s developer base. These include the provision of grants, an accelerator program launch, and funding for more marketing efforts.
Boba also aims to channel some of the new capital into ecosystem projects. Especially those that capitalize on the expertise provided by Web3 industry leaders.
About Boba Network
Built by decentralized infrastructure provider Enya, and launched back in 2018, the Boba Network is a hybrid computing platform. For the most part, the project did not come to greater attention until September 2021. During that month, Boba launched its mainnet and BOBA governance token. The BOBA token facilitates the project’s evolution as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Although the Boba Network is built on Ethereum scaling startup Optimism, Chiu explains that its computational layout differs. This is because Boba has a proprietary Hybrid Compute platform that addresses the computational limitations of Ethereum. As Chiu put it:
“We built Boba to address the computational limitations of Ethereum. Everyone else was focused on making Ethereum faster and cheaper, which of course, is necessary, but there’s an additional dimension of scalability that’s been neglected – computational complexity.”
Ethereum Layer 2 networks continue to gain traction, even amid the relative drop-off in the crypto prices.
Tolu is a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast based in Lagos. He likes to demystify crypto stories to the bare basics so that anyone anywhere can understand without too much background knowledge.
When he’s not neck-deep in crypto stories, Tolu enjoys music, loves to sing and is an avid movie lover.
Ecosystem
Research
News Network
About