Polygon Joins Arms Race To Become ‘The AWS Of Web 3’ With $450 Million In Fresh Funding

Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development platform Polygon has raised $450 million in its first major financing round led by Sequoia Capital India.

More than 40 venture capital firms, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive and Tiger Global, among others, have participated in a private sale of Polygon’s native MATIC token (Market cap as of February 7 is $14.4 billion).

“Our goal is to become the AWS of Web 3,” Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal told Forbes. “We want to provide the entire suite of solutions to the developers.”

Launched in 2017 as Matic Network, Polygon is one of the major so-called Layer-2 chains that are attempting to take the load off Ethereum’s heavily congested network. It hosts more than 7,000 applications and to date has processed over 1.3 billion transactions between 100 million unique wallets. 

“Polygon has become what we see as a platform of choice for folks who are trying to build and scale low-cost applications that we think could actually get adoption,” says Shailesh Lakhani, managing director at Sequoia India. “Probably 70-80% of the startups that we run into in crypto are using Polygon today.”

According to Nailwal, the funds will help the firm build products including Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge and Polygon Avail that are similar to Amazon Web Services’ offerings for Web 2 developers. Polygon is also heavily investing in zero knowledge (ZK) technology, which allows individuals and entities to verify data such as transactions and personal information or identification without handing over control of the information. In August, the project’s team committed $1 billion to ZK-related efforts.