Eclipse Labs Announces $50M Series A Funding co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC

Eclipse Labs, a software firm contributing to the development of the first Ethereum layer-2 using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), has raised $50M of Series A funding co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC, bringing the total capital raised to $65M. Other notable participants in the round include Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, Apollo-managed funds, and Fenbushi Capital. Additionally, the round includes strategic checks from Flow Traders, GSR, Auros, and OKX Ventures. Various researchers and builders participated as angel investors, including Barnabé Monnot (Ethereum Foundation), John Adler (Celestia Labs), Austin Federa (Solana Foundation), ZachXBT, and Meltem Demirors.

"Eclipse is built to be Ethereum's fastest layer-2, leveraging the best pieces of the modular stack available today," said Neel Somani, Founder of Eclipse Labs. "Ethereum needs a single, scalable, composable layer-2 capable of handling the 99% of use cases. Other L2 ecosystems have only optimized for full EVM compatibility, resulting in a highly fragmented, slow and undifferentiated L2 landscape. Eclipse integrates the high-performance SVM with the deep pools of liquidity on Ethereum, while maintaining the hard constraint of verifiability."

The Eclipse Labs team comprises Vijay Chetty, former Uniswap and dYdX Head of BD and Growth; David Lin, former VP of Engineering at the zk-L1 development company Discreet Labs; and ex-Citadel quant Neel Somani.

"Eclipse's launch will be the first of many harmonizations between Solana and Ethereum," says Tarun Chitra, Founder of Gauntlet and GP at Robot Ventures, an investor in Eclipse. "Neel and the team have spent a lot of time researching all of the technological and economic ways to try to get the best of both worlds when it comes to utilizing succinct proofs and fees."

Since its mainnet architecture announcement in September 2023, Eclipse Labs has released Devnet and Testnet versions of the Eclipse protocol. Leading dApps from the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems are anticipated to deploy to Eclipse Mainnet, once publicly available, including NFT marketplace Rarible, oracle infrastructure Pyth Network, and Solana borrow-lend protocol Solend.

"Previous layer-2 blockchains grappled with long proving times and limited data availability ? it's now possible to build a layer-2 as performant as Solana due to recent advancements by Celestia and RISC Zero," said Brian Retford, CEO at RISC Zero and angel investor in Eclipse. "Eclipse is the prime example of virtual machine innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem, and we anticipate Eclipse and its architecture will inspire new developers and enable new and exciting applications across the ecosystem."

On the horizon is Eclipse Mainnet, on track for a Q2 launch. The Eclipse ecosystem continues to grow, thanks in part to targeted initiatives aimed at independent software developers and genuine users. Top developers and projects deploying to Eclipse Mainnet will be offered ecosystem grants alongside engineering and marketing support. Eclipse Labs intends on sponsoring hackathons and accelerators, in addition to community-building events targeted toward users who interact with Eclipse Mainnet.

"In combining crypto's most performant, battle tested execution environment (the SVM), with Ethereum's deep book of liquid assets and established settlement, and Celestia's best-in-class data availability, Eclipse weaves together the best infrastructure components that crypto has to offer," said Chris Burniske of Placeholder. "What this looks like in practice for the user is Ethereum's fastest L2, with transactions that cost 1/100th of a cent. For developers, Eclipse represents the continued viral spread of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Similar to how we saw the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) become an industry standard in the years after Ethereum's launch, we expect the SVM to continue its rapid proliferation, with Eclipse representing the most promising innovation environment for builders to experiment with the SVM, outside of Solana itself."

Developers and users interested in participating in the Eclipse ecosystem can get connected via Eclipse's Discord and Twitter. Eclipse Labs is hiring for several roles, including a Growth Engineer, Marketing Lead, and People Operations Manager, with a preference for candidates based in the Bay Area.