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Ex-Coinbase employees raise $5.3 million for web3 infrastructure startup: Exclusive

Two former Coinbase employees have raised $5.3 million in a seed funding round for their web3 infrastructure startup.

Scale3 Labs emerged from stealth today alongside the fundraising announcement. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Mysten Labs and Howard University.

Founders Ola Muse and Karthik Kalyanaraman left Coinbase in August and managed to raise and close the seed round within two months, they told The Block in an interview. Scale3 is an infrastructure startup especially focused on serving blockchain node operators.

Kalyanaraman said that running nodes is «super hard» today for multiple blockchains. Nodes are an integral part of blockchain networks that validate transactions and keep networks safe. Muse said it currently takes about eight hours for operators to update their nodes and Scale3 reduces that time to «less than 20 minutes.»

Scale3 does that by offering a platform that does all the backend work and provides direct links for updates, similar to how an average web user updates their apps from an app store, according to Kalyanaraman. Scale3 also provides a monitoring dashboard that provides real-time updates from blockchain creators.

Scale3 currently supports Mysten Labs’ Sui blockchain on its platform, called Autopilot. Next, it plans to support Ethereum, Solana and Aptos. Muse said Scale3 aims to support the top 10 blockchains over the next six months.

With fresh capital in hand, Scale3 plans to grow its team and ecosystem. The current headcount of the firm is seven and Muse is looking to scale his team to 20 by early next year, with hires focused on engineering, product and marketing.

Muse declined to comment on the firm’s valuation and on whether the seed funding was an equity round, but he said that Scale3 doesn’t plan to issue its own native token.

The firm did not add any board seats in this round, according to Muse.

   

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