Ava Labs, the Brooklyn-based company behind popular smart contract platform Avalanche, has secured $350 million in fresh funding, according to a Thursday report by Bloomberg that cites anonymous sources in the know.
The massive fundraise will boost the company’s valuation to $5.25 billion. Ava Labs is yet to confirm the latest funding round.
Last September, Avalanche disclosed that it had raised $230 million through a private sale of AVAX tokens in order to further expand the project’s ecosystem.
Avalanche is one of the top smart contracts platforms that are vying to steal Ethereum’s crown. It positions itself as a much faster and cheaper alternative for running various decentralized applications.
Ava Labs was founded by Turkish-American computer scientist Emin Gün Sirer back in 2018. It initially raised $6 million from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz and cryptocurrency-focused investment firm Polychain Capital in 2019. In July 2020, the project raised $45 million through a public sale of its AVAX token.
AVAX, the native token of the Avalanche platform, is currently in 10th place by market capitalization, sitting just above meme coin Dogecoin. The price of the token has spiked 5.41% over the past 24 hours on the news, outperforming Bitcoin and other top altcoins.
Cryptocurrency companies keep attracting plenty of capital despite the fact that the cryptocurrency market remains under pressure. As reported by U.Today, Circle, the issuer of USD Coin, recently raked in $400 million in new funding from such big-name investors as Blackrock and Fidelity.
Arman Shirinyan
