Eclipse Secured $15M for Customizable Solana VM
Eclipse, a developer of customizable modular rollups, has secured $15M for Customizable Solana VM in pre-seed and seed investment.
With this secured $15M financing of Eclipse for customizable Solana VM to enhance throughput, while offering developers the ability to build their own mix of speed, decentralization, and cost.
Applications may use Eclipse to create their own trust-minimized app chains, which are powered by the Solana virtual machine.
Leading Investors
Tribe Capital and Tabiya co-led Eclipse’s $9 million seed round, which was backed by Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Crypto, and CoinList, among others. Polychain led a $6 million pre-seed round that included Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures, and Accel, as well as famous angel investors such as Dawn Song of Oasis Labs, Sreeram Kannan of EigenLayer, and Ryan Fang of Ankr.
Eclipse solves a major pain point in the Web3 development ecosystem. With recent enterprise interest in Web3 use cases, applications are still force to share the same throughput as other applications building on the same blockchain, with no option to leave if the application faces downtime or high transaction costs.
Going beyond traditional alternatives such as Aptos and Starkware, Eclipse enables developers to deploy their own types of rollups powered by the Solana virtual machine, using any chain for security or data storage. Down the line, Eclipse will support the Move language, too.
Eclipse has already partnered with a series of major ecosystems including Celestia, EigenLayer, Oasis Labs, Polygon, Cosmos, and NEAR. It has also received a development grant from the Solana Foundation to support the development of rollups powered by the Solana virtual machine.
Management Quote
“Eclipse has the potential to bring more people to the Sealevel VM,” says Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana co-founder and angel investor in Eclipse. “Eclipse paves the path for Solana’s runtime to communicate with Cosmos chains through IBC.”
The platform was launched as a portfolio company of Anagram, a venture capital fund founded by Lily Liu. The team consists of Neel Somani, ex-Citadel quantitative researcher, ex-Airbnb software engineer and Sam Thapaliya, founder of Zebec protocol, one of the most widely adopted applications on Solana. Zebec will create its own knowledge rollups chain using Eclipse’s technology. Which will serve as a lighthouse use case for the Eclipse architecture.
“As major corporations and governments begin entering the blockchain space. Eclipse is essential infrastructure to facilitate their use cases, such as Web2-scale consumer and financial applications,” said Niraj Pant, General Partner of Polychain Capital.
The Eclipse technology will pave the way for an optimistic rollup that may render many previous rollups obsolete. The new rollup technology’s value proposition has already piqued the interest of more than 50 protocols, including Zebec, Notifi, and Friktion.
Eclipse’s developer tooling will readily enable customizable blockchains. Removing the need for each development team to become their own protocol creator.
About the Raised Fund
They want to utilize the funding opportunities to grow the Eclipse ecosystem and expedite technological progress, namely by employing Rust engineers and growing the business development team.
The team anticipates a public testnet to go live in early 2023. The network will be launched with support from the Celestia ecosystem; the team has already joined Celestia’s Modular Fellows program and entered a token swap with Celestia’s foundation.
“We’re excited to support Eclipse as a data availability solution for their Solana VM rollup,” says Mustafa Al-Bassam, CEO at Celestia Labs. “Modularity will enable developers using Eclipse to deploy code as a customizable rollup, saving significant development cost and time.”
“Eclipse is building the next generation of infrastructure for the upcoming wave of decentralized applications. As a protocol, if you want throughput at scale, you should consider using Eclipse. The type of opportunity set, growth trajectory, and network effect. We look for in Tribe Capital’s crypto incubator program,” says Boris Resvin, Managing Partner of Tribe Capital.
“While web services were originally monolithic. They eventually de-coupled into microservices where you could swap out each of the pieces,” elaborated Neel Somani, co-founder of Eclipse. “A blockchain architecture like Eclipse is a natural progression in the history of technology.”
About Eclipse
Eclipse, a San Francisco-based technology company founded in 2022 by Neel Somani and Sam Thapaliya. Eclipse enables developers to deploy their own customizable rollups. Using the Solana virtual machine, using any chain for security or data storage. Their public testnet will go live in the Celestia environment in 2023, and will extend out across blockchain ecosystems.
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