Near Foundation Spins out Nuffle Labs Raising $13M Funding

The Swiss not-for-profit organization behind the NEAR Protocol, NEAR Foundation, has launched a new modular product suite to form Nuffle Labs. raising $13 million in funding.

The funding round was led by venture capital firm Electric Capital and NEAR Foundation said it contributed a grant toward Nuffle Labs.

Other participants in the funding round include investments from angel investors Dovey Wan from Primitive Ventures and Sandeep Nailwal from Polygon. Canonical Crypto, Fabric Ventures, Robot Ventures, Caladan, Lyrik Ventures and more.

NEAR Foundation said the investment will be used to work on the modular infrastructure of Nuffle Labs building for the next generation of high-performance rollups and decentralise innovation within its ecosystem.

“We are thrilled about the incredible opportunity to grow and develop NEAR’s modular product offerings at Nuffle Labs,” said Altan Tutar, CEO of Nuffle Labs.

“We’re proud to support the growth of Nuffle Labs as an independent company in the NEAR ecosystem,” said Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and CEO of NEAR Foundation.

“These four excellent co-founders have built first-rate modularity products that showcase the best of NEAR’s technology with NEAR DA and the NEAR Fast Finality Layer, providing cost-effective and performant solutions to projects across Web3. We look forward to continued collaboration with the NEAR Foundation as they expand and evolve,” adds Polosukhin.

VC Funding Surges 2024

In February, Electrical Capital led a seed funding round in the crypto wallet provider Fordefi raising $10 million. The funding was raised to help bring its institutional-grade crypto wallet to retail platforms.

Venture capital funding in the Web3, gaming, artificial intelligence and crypto space has experienced a surge in the first quarter of 2024, breaking a two-year downtrend.

Both the total amount invested and the number of projects receiving VC funding have seen substantial increases since Q4 2023, according to data gathered by crypto analysis platform Crypto Koryo, as reported by Ruholamin Haqshanas from Cryptonews.