Web 3 Infrastructure Startup Aligned Exits Stealth With $34M in Funding

Aligned, a Web 3 infrastructure provider founded by former ConsenSys Chief Strategy Officer Sam Cassatt, has emerged from stealth with a $34 million funding round at an undisclosed valuation.

Investors in the round included crypto market maker and Aligned ecosystem partner GSR, Altium Capital, Calvary Fund and a number of private investors, including film producer and sports agent Happy Walters.

The round was primarily used to expand Aligned's high-performance computing footprint.

“We are buying silicon, manufacturing and installing the custom hardware that we produce with that silicon, as well as expanding our HPC (high-performance computing) team,” Cassatt told CoinDesk in an email. “Most of this hardware will go into our primary data center and will be expanding to more soon.”

The product line of Puerto Rico-based Aligned includes technology for mining, staking and liquidity provisioning for Ethereum-compatible blockchains, including layer 2 networks, as well as prominent blockchains and emerging architectures.

The growth of proof-of-stake blockchains has increased the demand for staking and validators. Aligned enables on-chain liquidity provisioning and said it has, to date, supported the deployment of 15,000 ETH (about $440.5 million) across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

The company says it’s working with clients like Neptune DAO that provide liquidity to upstart DeFi projects to deploy liquidity to their platforms.

“You need three basic things to make a DeFi application work, and we provide all of them: 1. liquidity/money in the protocol, 2. software that sends the transactions and runs the blockchain, and 3. computers to run it on, in our case specialized hardware that is designed for this use,” Cassatt said. “Taken together, this is a ‘full-stack’ infrastructure since it works and operates at these layers in a vertically integrated way.”

Crypto infrastructure firms have become venture capital darlings in recent weeks with Blockdaemon raising $207 million at a $3.25 billion valuation and Alchemy bringing in $200 million at a $10 billion valuation.

CORRECTION (Feb. 24, 22:52 UTC): Due to a copy-editing error the name of the company making the announcement was made incorrect. The company is Aligned, not Aligned Capital, which is a separate entity not connected to this announcement.