Former Meta employees raise $200 million for blockchain startup Aptos

Aptos has raised $200 million in a round led by a16z crypto, with other investors ranging from Multicoin Capital to Coinbase Ventures.

Aptos was founded by former Meta employees with the goal of building a scalable layer 1 blockchain able to reach a wider audience of “billions” of people. The technology is based on the Diem network, which the company’s founders worked on while at Meta (former Facebook). The company also announced in a blog post on Tuesday the launch of its “public Devnet.”

Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh said one of the company’s key features is the use of Move, an open-source programing language developed by Meta’s Novi, in the same post.

“Our goal is to work with some of the world’s largest brands and tech companies to really build a web3 ecosystem for the masses,” he told TechCrunch.

Other investors included in Aptos’s round of fundraising are Katie Haun, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, IRONGREY, Hashed, Variant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures and Paxos.

While not disclosing numbers, Aptos founders told TechCrunch they were “well off into the unicorn territory,” indicating that the company was valued at a minimum of $1 billion.

A group of four other Meta alumni has also recently launched a similar project called Mysten Labs. 

“We decided to launch the company and try to launch products ourselves rather than waiting for a big company to come around and push a little bit harder,” one of the co-founders Evan Cheng told The Block last month.