Mark Cuban-backed Polygon raises nearly half a billion dollars from 40 VCs led by Sequoia

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Mark Cuban-backed Polygon raises nearly half a billion dollars from 40 VCs led by Sequoia
Representative imageCanva/BI India
  • The round was led by Sequoia Capital India, followed by the likes of SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
  • Polygon was founded by Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun in 2017.
  • The funds will be raised through a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token.
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Homegrown blockchain technology firm Polygon has raised $450 million from more than 40 venture capital firms.

The round was led by Sequoia Capital India, followed by the likes of SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital and others. Brevan Howard’s Alan Howard and Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary, popularly known as Mr Wonderful on ABC’s Shark Tank, also participated in the round.

“Thousands of developers across a range of applications are choosing Polygon and their complete set of scaling solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Statement by Shailesh Lakhani, managing director at Sequoia Capital India

The funds will be raised through a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token. The cryptocurrency did dip during the January doldrums, but its price is back up at ₹151 as of February 8 at 11:00 a.m., Indian Standard Time (IST).

Polygon is among the top 20 biggest cryptocurrencies in the world with a market value of ₹1.1 lakh crore.

What is Polygon?


Polygon, originally known as the Matic Network, launched back in 2017 with Sandep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun and Jaynti Kanani as its founders. The platform is built around the Ethereum blockchain, which can be used for developing other decentralised apps (DApps) like decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs).

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Simply put, Polygon is designed to solve scalability and usability issues that exist in the Ethereum blockchain, without compromising an app’s core decentralised aspect.

“Ethereum, scaled by Polygon, will be the bedrock of this next stage in the Web’s evolution. Technological disruption didn’t start with Web2, nor is it going to end there.”

Statement by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder and chief executive of Polygon

Decentraland, one of the biggest metaverse projects in the world right now, added Polygon to its platform in 2021 to solve the issues that users were facing with Ethereum. OVR, an augmented reality (AR) metaverse based on Ethereum, also moved over to Polygon recently due to Ethereum’s inherent issues.

Overall, the Polygon network has more than 130 million unique addresses and over 2.67 million monthly active users who are generating some 3 million transactions per day.

The company had raised a “sizable investment” from US-based billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban last May. Just last month, Polygon onboarded YouTube’s head of gaming, Ryan Wyatt, to lead Polygon Studios — the part of its business that works on bringing game and other media entities onto the network.

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