Avalanche Raises $42 Million in Less Than 4.5 Hours

AVA Labs, the team behind Avalanche, an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications in a highly-scalable ecosystem, recently raised $42M in a 4.5 hour-long token sale last Wednesday. The sale marks one of the largest ICO’s out of the U.S. since 2017.

Avalanche’s Recent Key Hires

AVA Labs, founded by Cornell Ph.D.’s and led by Professor Emin Gun Sirer, initially completed a $6M Series A in 2019 backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, Metastable, Polychain, and angel investors, Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan.

In early 2020, AVA Labs acquired a startup called Investery – a SaaS platform founded by John Wu to facilitate investor discovery, management, and transacting of private market assets.

The acquisition allowed the company to acquire top talent John Wu and Lydia Chiu as President of AVA Labs and VP of Business Development, respectively. They previously had worked at Tiger Management and Credit Suisse. These new additions allowed the company to strengthen its core competencies.

The key hires helped the company raise $12M in a private sale from firms such as Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, Initialized Capital, NGC Ventures, Dragonfly Capital.

The public sale, carried out last Wednesday, finished in 4.5 hours, raising a total of $42 million.

DeFi As Avalanche’s Core Use Case

CryptoPotato reached out to John Wu, President of AVA Labs, who said:

“Slow speeds and high transaction fees have hampered the growth of DeFi. […] No other blockchain project has the combined expertise of Wall Street veterans and leading technologists of Ava Labs. The Avalanche technology will bring scalability and high transaction speeds that will make using blockchain for financial applications more compelling for Wall Street and mainstream audiences.”

Ava Labs will soon be conducting a DeFi hackathon in conjunction with Chainlink and Quantstamp, according to the team. They will put out a bid for applications for developers in September after the launch of the Avalanche public mainnet in August.