Community Labs raises $30 million to power software development and venture studio for Arweave’s permanent storage blockchain ecosystem
Funding round positions Community Labs as a native software development company and venture studio focused on accelerating developer tools, use cases, and adoption of decentralized permanent data storage
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Community Labs has raised $30 million to power software development and a venture studio focused on supporting Arweave adoption, ecosystem growth, and protocol development. The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from industry leaders Arweave, Bain Capital Crypto, Blockchain Capital, Distributed Global and Road Capital Management alongside others.
Community Labs will develop and support critical developer tools and foundational ecosystem solutions that onboard the next 1,000 active Arweave developers and founders, beginning with 3EM – short for Web 3 Execution Machine, a code agnostic smart contract framework. Community Labs is modeled after ConsenSys, the well known software development company building on the Ethereum blockchain.
The funding signals conviction of Arweave’s position as a ubiquitous storage layer for other blockchains and consumer use cases. Tate Berenbaum, founder and CEO, is excited about the platform potential and flywheel effect: “It’s an exciting time to be building Community Labs in a way that will enable others to understand and utilize the potential of Web3 and permanent decentralized storage.” Leo Lucisano, operating advisor, acknowledges the timing of the round: “The structure, size, and valuation of the platform at this pivotal moment in the market cycle is a testament to Tate and the team’s commitment to developer tooling, infrastructure, and adoption.”
Lightspeed Venture Partners is excited to lead the round: “Decentralized storage is a critical piece of the Web3 infrastructure stack and Arweave is well positioned to serve as the de facto solution. Arweave’s novel architecture guarantees data availability and data persistence, in addition to providing a new design space for application development. We are excited to partner with Tate and the entire Community Labs team in building foundational infrastructure for the Arweave ecosystem,” said Will Leas, Partner at Lightspeed Faction and Advisor at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Arweave has experienced a renaissance of its own as it emerges as a censorship resistant permanent hard drive and repository for geopolitical news events. After raising $8.3 million in 2020 from blue chip venture firms Andreesen Horowitz, Union Square Venture and Coinbase Ventures, Arweave established itself as a leader in decentralized data storage. Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, is a fan and mentor: ‘Tate and the Community Labs team have long been core members of the Arweave ecosystem, leading many community innovations over the past two years. We are extremely excited to support them as they grow their venture and explorations in the Arweave ecosystem.’
About Community Labs
Community Labs is an Arweave-native software development company and venture studio for products and protocols built on the permaweb. Community Labs is modeled after the Ethereum software development company ConsenSys and is focused on developing foundational-level infrastructure for the next thousand developers and million users of Arweave’s permanent storage blockchain. Tate Berenbaum, founder and CEO, has been building on Arweave since 2019 and has experience bringing several foundational protocols to market.
About Arweave
Arweave is a protocol that allows you to store data permanently, sustainably, with a single upfront fee. It organizes people with hard drive space to spare (think Uber for storage) in a decentralized network (like Bitcoin), backed by a sustainable endowment. On top of the core Arweave protocol lives the permaweb: A global, permanent web of pages and applications that live forever.
Contacts
Tate Berenbaum
Founder & CEO
Community Labs
tb@communitylabs.com