NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Community Labs has raised $30 million to power software development and a venture studio focused on supporting Arweave adoption, ecosystem growth, and protocol development. The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from industry leaders Arweave, Bain Capital Crypto, Blockchain Capital, Distributed Global and Road Capital Management along with others.
Community Labs will develop and support critical developer tools and foundational ecosystem solutions onboarded by the next 1,000 active Arweave developers and founders, starting with 3EM – short for Web 3 Execution Machine, a code-agnostic smart contract framework. Community Labs is modeled after ConsenSys, the well-known software development company that builds on the Ethereum blockchain.
The funding signals confidence in Arweave’s position as a ubiquitous storage layer for other blockchains and consumer cases. Tate Berenbaum, founder and CEO, is excited about the platform’s potential and the flywheel effect: “It’s an exciting time to build Community Labs in a way that enables others to understand and leverage the potential of Web3 and permanent decentralized storage.” Leo Lucisano, Operations Advisor, acknowledges the timing of the round: “The structure, size and valuation of the platform at this pivotal moment in the market cycle is a testament to Tate and his team’s commitment to developer tools, infrastructure and adoption.”
Lightspeed Venture Partners is pleased to lead the round: “Decentralized storage is a critical part of the Web3 infrastructure stack, and Arweave is well positioned to serve as the de facto solution. Arweave’s new architecture guarantees data availability and data persistence, as well as providing a new design space for application development. We are excited to working with Tate and the entire Community Labs team to build foundational infrastructure for the Arweave ecosystem,” said Will Leas, Partner at Lightspeed Faction and Advisor at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Arweave has experienced a renaissance of its own as it appears as a censorship-resistant permanent hard drive and repository for geopolitical news events. After raising $8.3 million in 2020 from blue chip venture firms Andreesen Horowitz, Union Square Venture and Coinbase Ventures, Arweave established itself as a leader in decentralized data storage. Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, is a fan and mentor: “Tate and the Community Labs team have long been core members of the Arweave ecosystem, leading many community innovations over the past two years. We are extremely excited to support them as they grow their business and explorations in the Arweave ecosystem.’
About Community Labs
Community Labs is an Arweave native software development company and venture studio for products and protocols built on permaweb. Community Labs is modeled after the software development company Ethereum ConsenSys and is focused on developing foundation-level infrastructure for the next thousand developers and millions of users of Arweave’s permanent storage blockchain. Tate Berenbaum, founder and CEO, has been building on Arweave since 2019 and has experience bringing several foundational protocols to market.
About Arweave
Arweave is a protocol that allows you to store data permanently, sustainably, with a single upfront fee. It organizes people with spare hard drive space (think Uber for storage) into a decentralized network (like Bitcoin), backed by a sustainable endowment. On top of the core Arweave protocol lives the permaweb: A global, permanent web of pages and applications that live forever.
