Blockchain infrastructure provider InfStones, which aims to serve as a flexible Amazon Web Services-like platform for Web 3 development, has closed a $33 million Series B funding round from a group of investors including Susquehanna. International Group (SIG) and Dragonfly Capital. No valuation was provided, and the round brought the company’s total funding to $45 million.
Other investors in the round included Qiming Venture Partners, DHVC, A&T, and Value Internet Fund.
Founded in 2018 with offices in Beijing, the United States and Canada, InfStones plans to use the funds to expand its operations in Asia, Europe and South America. The company will also triple its team from 30 to 90 employees over the next year and expand support to more than 100 blockchains and protocols, up from more than 50 today.
InfStones has been profitable since 2018, CEO Zhenwu Shi told CoinDesk in an interview. The purpose of fundraising is to build the ecosystem and network of supporters. Current InfStones clients include cryptocurrency exchange Binance and analytics firm Dune Analytics.
The InfStones platform provides easy access to protocol consensus and the benefits of proof-of-stake participation. Users can run validation nodes, access on-chain data, and build decentralized applications on multiple chains. The Platform as a Service supports tens of thousands of nodes on blockchains, including BNB Chain, Cardano, Chainlink, Ethereum, Polkadot, Polygon, and Solana.
“Many blockchains want to become more decentralized, which requires more people to launch a node in their ecosystem. But those people are inexperienced in technology and don’t know how to maintain those nodes,” Shi said. “Using our product, they can very easily launch and participate in the blockchain network.”
InfStones has also released a new front end user interface that allows customers to easily deploy nodes in a matter of minutes. The public Application Programming Interface (API) can implement nodes for BNB Chain, BSC Archival Data, Ethereum and NEO with support for Cosmos and other chains coming soon.
“Just as AWS has made it easy for enterprises to deploy applications on servers, storage, and databases, InfStones makes it easy to deploy nodes, APIs, and other services,” Tom Schmidt, a partner at Dragonfly Capital, said in a press release. “Their platform helps lower the barriers to entry for startups looking to incorporate blockchain technology into their stack.”
Other firms vying for the same crown are also raking in big bucks. Both Blockdaemon and Alchemy have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in recent weeks.
