Nischal Shetty-led Shardeum secures $5.4M in strategic raise

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible sharded blockchain, Shardeum, has secured $5.4 million in a strategic round from Amber Group, Galxe, J17 Capital, TRGC, Jsquare, Bware Labs, Tané Labs, Hyperithm Group, Luganodes, Blockchain Ventures Hub, CryptoViet Ventures, and Blue7.

With the additional funding, Shardeum plans to bolster the ecosystem's growth as it prepares for the upcoming mainnet launch scheduled later this year.

According to co-founder Nischal Shetty, during the strategic round, Shardeum laid out its two objectives: bringing Web3 project teams closer to its mission by involving them as early holders of SHM tokens, and partnering with strategic funds to expand into new regions and build communities.

“These two reasons led to the creation of the strategic round. The objective wasn’t a typical private sale. It was to cherry-pick those investors and projects who can bring strong strategic value to the Shardeum ecosystem. This round helps us build a more friendly and collaborative ecosystem around Shardeum,” Shetty added in a tweet.

This strategic round follows Shardeum’s $18.2 million funding in a seed round in October 2022, where the company was valued at $200 million. The round was led by Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, and Foresight Ventures.

In 2022, Nischal Shetty and Omar Syed launched Shardeum, a Layer 1 blockchain based on the EVM, aiming to address the limitations of existing blockchains by achieving infinite scalability, decentralisation, and enhanced security. Utilising dynamic state sharding, Shardeum is designed for low gas fees and high transactions per second as the network expands.

Shardeum claims its testnet has witnessed over 7.4 million transactions, with over 820,000 accounts, and more than 230,000 deployed contracts as of July 7, 2023.