Celestia Foundation raises $100M

The Celestia Foundation today announced it has raised $100 million in support led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Syncracy Capital, 1kx, Robot Ventures, Placeholder, and more. This brings the project’s total amount raised to $155M.

Celestia Mainnet Beta went live in October 2023, delivering the industry’s first specialized modular consensus and data network. Since launch, an early ecosystem has taken form, with developers deploying the first 20 rollup chains and Celestia data blobs recently hitting more than half of total data published by rollups.

Before Celestia, scaling permissionless blockchains typically meant optimizing a monolithic L1, where applications run on a single shared execution layer. But Celestia is not constrained by execution layer overhead, enabling a path to scale throughput beyond current monolithic constraints. Developers are not confined to a single smart contract language, virtual-machine, or even a rollup framework.

With Celestia underneath, developers can deploy high-throughput, unstoppable applications using any VM, whether to scale existing ecosystems like Ethereum or as their own sovereign networks.

Recently, Celestia’s core developer community announced its technical roadmap with a core objective: relentlessly scale to 1 gigabyte blocks, bringing a massive increase in data throughput to Celestia’s rollup ecosystem. In a previous era, the throughput of Visa (~24,000 TPS) was considered an impressive North Star. With 1 gigabyte blocks, Celestia is tracking to deliver the capacity of many Visa networks in parallel.

“When Celestia launched last year as the first modular data availability layer, it scaled blockspace from the dial-up era to the broadband era,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, co-founder of Celestia and Chairman of the Celestia Foundation. “Now, the core developers have introduced the technical roadmap to scale blockspace to the fiber optic era - while keeping it verifiable and low latency.”