San Francisco – (Business Wire)– Eclipse, a customizable modular rollup provider, announced today that it has raised $15 million in pre-seed and seed funding. Eclipse maximizes throughput while also giving developers the flexibility to customize speed, dispersion, and cost balance. With Eclipse, applications can build their own trust-minimized application chains, powered by the Solana virtual machine.
Eclipse’s $9 million seed round was co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, with participation from Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Crypto, and CoinList. The $6 million pre-seed round was led by Polychain and joined by Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures and Accel, as well as prominent angel investors including Dawn Song of Oasis Labs, Sreeram Kannan of EigenLayer and Ryan Fang of Ankr.
Eclipse addresses a major pain point in the Web3 development ecosystem. With the recent enterprise interest in Web3 use cases, applications are still forced to share the same throughput with other applications built on the same blockchain, with no option to leave if an application faces downtime or high transaction costs. In addition to traditional alternatives such as Aptos and Starkware, Eclipse enables developers to deploy their own rollups powered by Solana virtual machines, using any security chain or data store. Eventually, Eclipse will also support the Move language.
Eclipse has partnered with a range of major ecosystems, including Celestia, EigenLayer, Oasis Labs, Polygon, Cosmos and NEAR. It also received a development grant from the Solana Foundation to support the development of rollups powered by the Solana Virtual Machine.
“Eclipse has the potential to bring more people to Sealevel VM,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana and an angel investor in Eclipse. “Eclipse paves the way for Solana’s runtime to communicate with the Cosmos chain via IBC.”
Eclipse is a portfolio company of Anagram, a venture capital fund founded by Lily Liu. The team consists of former Citadel quantitative researcher, former Airbnb software engineer Neel Somani, and Sam Thapaliya, founder of Zebec Protocol, one of the most widely adopted applications on Solana. Zebec will use Eclipse’s technology to create its own aggregation chain, which will serve as a beacon use case for the Eclipse architecture.
“As large corporations and governments begin to enter the blockchain space, Eclipse is an important piece of infrastructure to facilitate their use cases, such as Web2-scale consumer and financial applications,” said Niraj Pant, general partner at Polychain Capital.
Eclipse technology will lay the foundation for a new type of rollup that could make many other rollups obsolete. The value proposition of the new aggregation technology has already generated interest from more than 50 protocols, including Zebec, Notifi, and Friktion.
The tools Eclipse will provide to developers will enable customizable blockchains with ease, without each development team having to be their own protocol designer.
Funds raised by Eclipse will be used to grow the Eclipse ecosystem and further technology development, especially by attracting Rust engineers and expanding the business development team.
The team expects the public testnet to go live in early 2023. The network will be launched with the support of the Celestia ecosystem; the team has joined Celestia’s Modular Fellows program and has conducted a token swap with Celestia’s foundation.
“We are pleased to support Eclipse as the data availability solution for Solana VM rollups,” said Mustafa Al-Bassam, CEO of Celestia Labs. “Modularity will enable developers using Eclipse to deploy code as customizable rollups, saving A lot of development cost and time.”
“Eclipse is building the next generation of infrastructure for the coming wave of decentralized applications. As a protocol, if you want massive throughput, you should consider Eclipse. That’s exactly our opportunity set, growth trajectory, and network effects of the type to look for in Tribe Capital’s cryptocurrency incubator program,” said Boris Resvin, managing partner at Tribe Capital.
“While web services were initially monolithic, they were eventually decoupled into microservices where you could exchange each part,” Eclipse co-founder Neel Somani elaborated. “A blockchain architecture like Eclipse is a natural progression in the history of technology.”
About the eclipse:
Eclipse is a San Francisco-based tech 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 security chain or data store. Their public testnet will go live in the Celestia ecosystem in 2023 and will be rolled out to the blockchain ecosystem thereafter.Developers interested in Eclipse technologies can sign up for the mailing list on the Eclipse website and follow Eclipse’s Twitter.