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Blockchain developer Movement Labs locks in $38 million VC round
Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain developer, has raised $38 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital.
THE financing should support its mission of integrating Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine into Ethereum (ET). This would address smart contract vulnerabilities and improve transaction speed, the company said.
The funding round attracted investments from well-known venture capital firms such as Hack VC, Placeholder, Figment Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Aptos Labs, among others.
According to Movement Labs, between 2022 and 2023, the Ethereum ecosystem suffered losses totaling over $5.4 billion due to smart contract exploits.
The startup’s Move-EVM product is designed to prevent such attacks by allowing developers to deploy code that undergoes real-time verification, effectively blocking attack vectors such as come back in.
Move is a Rust-based programming language developed by Facebook for its Day blockchain crypto payment project, which was discontinued in 2022.
It is designed to run on any platform and provides a framework for writing secure smart contracts used in cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized applications (apps).
Busy year for Movement Labs
Movement Labs has been promoting the adoption of Move ever since securing a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023.
Major contributors to the fund included Varys Capital, Blizzard’s Avalanche Fund, dao5, Borderless Capital, and others within the Wormhole developer ecosystem.
Angel investors who participated include Ankr’s Chandler Song, Ryan Fang and Stanley Wu, as well as dao5’s George Lampeth and Eigenlayer’s Calvin Liu.
The money from the pre-seed round was also intended to introduce the Movement SDK, a tool aimed at simplifying the creation of secure, high-performance Move environments for established blockchains.
Also, earlier this year, Movement Labs collaborated with Covalent (CQT), a multichain indexer with integration across 225 chains, to bring real-time indexing and data delivery tools, including Covalent’s Unified API and GoldRush Kit, to the Movement ecosystem.
Covalent’s unified API offers continuous access to historical and real-time blockchain data, making it a vital tool for AI in web3. The GoldRush Kit enhances the user experience by providing an intuitive interface for accessing and viewing historical blockchain data within the Movement Labs ecosystem.