Blockchain Infrastructure Project Eclipse Raises $15m To Build ‘Universal Layer-2’

UPDATE (April 30, 2025, 19:20 UTC): Updated to remove Sam Thapaliya's identification as a co-founder, per an Eclipse request in April 2025. The company claims that Thapaliya was never a founder or co-founder of the company, despite press releases in 2022 identifying him as one of the founders of the firm. Thapaliya acted as an adviser in 2022, but left that position in 2023, Eclipse said in 2025. In a statement shared through an external spokesperson, Eclipse CEO Vijay Chetty said, "Sam is not and has never been a shareholder, officer, or director of Eclipse. He has no entitlement to any tokens. For part of 2022, in Eclipse's earliest days, Sam was an advisor to Eclipse. However, Sam was never a 'founder' or 'co-founder.’ He has not advised Eclipse since 2023 when Eclipse terminated his advisory, and has not been involved with the project in any way for a significant amount of time. In fact, in December 2023, Mr. Thapaliya's company Zebec filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court to try to argue Zebec was owed a huge share of any Eclipse airdrop. That case was dismissed the following year. Since I've taken over as CEO at Eclipse Labs in May 2024, I have been committed to improving the trajectory of this company and the Eclipse protocol. I realize that we have our fair share of naysayers that will doubt Eclipse and assume the worst no matter what we do. But I remain committed to leading through transparency and doing everything I can to make sure that this protocol succeeds."

Eclipse, a blockchain scaling project, has raised $15 million in pre-seed and seed funding at a nine-figure valuation.

Eclipse’s $9 million seed round was co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, a crypto venture capital firm started by former Binance executives. Other participants in the round included Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Crypto and CoinList.

The platform’s earlier $6 million pre-seed round was led by Polychain Capital and included participation from Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures, The House Fund, and Accel.

Eclipse is a customizable rollup provider that is compatible with multiple layer-1 blockchains. The platform enables developers to deploy their own rollup powered by the Solana operating system, using any chain for security or data storage.

Rollups, a category of layer-2s, help blockchains scale by increasing a chain’s throughput, which allows applications to handle more transactions in a given time frame.

“We’re like a universal layer-2,” Eclipse co-founder Neel Somani told CoinDesk. “Solana, Sui and Aptos are fast, but they don’t offer enough throughput to enable on-chain anything too computationally intensive, like machine learning.”

Eclipse, Somani says, will open the door for more “proactive use cases” for crypto.

Read More:Jump-Backed Wormhole, Pyth Launch on Aptos Blockchain

Eclipse plans to launch a public testnet on the Cosmos ecosystem in early 2023, and also has plans to support Aptos’ Move language in the future.

"Eclipse paves the path for Solana's runtime to communicate with Cosmos chains through Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)," said Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana and an angel investor in Eclipse.

"As major corporations and governments begin entering the blockchain space, Eclipse is essential infrastructure to facilitate their use cases, such as Web2-scale consumer and financial applications," said Niraj Pant, General Partner of Polychain Capital.

With the new fundraise, Somani and co-founder Sam Thapaliya plans to hire Rust developers and business development staff to grow the project’s ecosystem.

Eclipse has also forged partnerships with several ecosystems, including Celestia, EigenLayer, Oasis Labs, Polygon, Cosmos, and NEAR.