Caldera, a Web3 infrastructure platform that helps developers deploy Ethereum rollups for scaling up blockchain networks, today announced it has raised $15 million in an early-stage funding round.

Today’s Series A funding round was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, Arkstream Capital and Lattice. This latest investment brings Caldera’s total capital raised to $25 million since its founding in 2022.

Many blockchain projects use Ethereum to deploy decentralized applications, leading to slow and costly transactions. To address this issue, Layer 2 blockchain networks, which run on top of primary blockchains such as Ethereum, built using rollups help scale transactions by bundling them together before submitting them to the Ethereum blockchain to accelerate transaction speeds and reduce costs. This “rolling up” of transactions allows them to be submitted all at once, reducing transaction times and the fees associated with writing them to the primary or what is called the Layer 1 blockchain.

However, Caldera argues that although many Layer 2 scaling and rollup projects exist, they are plagued by their own high costs, slow building processes and increased risks associated with hiring experts to deal with protocol engineering and site reliability. Seeing this issue, the company said it seeks to resolve this issue by providing a “one-click” interface to allow developers to deploy their own L2 rollup networks on reliable infrastructure that handles ongoing maintenance and security.

To build toward that vision, Caldera intends to develop what it calls the Metalayer network, a suite of Web3 tools for customizable, high-performance application-specific rollups. The project brings major Ethereum blockchain scaling frameworks together, including Arbitrum Nitro, Optimism’s OP Stack, ZKsync’s ZK Stack and Polygon CDK, so developers can more easily choose their rollup protocol.

“Revolutionizing rollup deployment is the next step in achieving a truly scalable and decentralized blockchain ecosystem,” said Chief Executive Matt Katz. “While building and growing Caldera to become the leading rollup ecosystem, we have identified interesting new gaps in the space that we aim to fill with the Metalayer. Our goal is to unify the Ethereum ecosystem by providing seamless interoperability between various rollup frameworks.”

Caldera says it currently supports more than 50 rollups with more than 1.7 unique wallets that hold in excess of $800 million in total locked-in value and has overseen the completion of more than 59 million transactions. The company has assisted with the creation of notable blockchains such as Manta Pacific, ApeChain, Treasure, Plume Network, Towns, Kinto, RARI Chain and Zero Network by Zerion.

Using Multilayer, Caldera said, it hopes to increase the adoption of Ethereum blockchain-based technology projects by providing developers with an easy-to-use scaling option that takes the technical weight off their shoulders.

“Caldera is capturing two core markets: major existing projects looking to launch their own rollup, and new teams that may not have the capital or infrastructure to manually launch their own chain from scratch,” said Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund. “As the crypto space has evolved, it’s now mature enough to support developers being able to pick and choose their own modular stack, much in the same way the web evolved away from monolithic infrastructure to more modular services based in the cloud.”

Katz said that the new funding will be used to focus on building out Multilayer to assist developers with scaling their blockchain application and ecosystem projects and expanding the company’s 15-person team to keep up with customer needs.

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