(This Feb 7 story officially corrects public valuation to $20 billion from $2 billion in paragraph 2 after the company clarified)
By Lisa Pauline Mattackal
(Reuters) – Polygon, a decentralized scaling platform for the ethereum blockchain, announced on Monday it has raised $450 million in its latest funding round led by Sequoia Capital India and including investments from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.
The round takes Polygon’s public valuation to $20 billion, a company spokesperson said. It has a market capitalization of about $15.6 billion based on its native MATIC cryptocurency token.
Other investors in Polygon’s funding round included Tiger Global, Galaxy Digital and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.
Polygon allows developers to build and scale ethereum blockchain-based applications for projects related to decentralized finance, Web3 and the metaverse, among others. The company says it has over 7,000 decentralized apps building on its platform.
The funds were raised through a private sale of MATIC, which jumped over 16% to $1.96 on Monday, CoinMarketCap data showed.
Investors have plowed money into blockchain and cryptocurrency-focused companies in the past year as hype around “metaverse”, Web3 and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) soared.
“Adoption by individual users and enterprises, the emergence of real-world applications like DeFi and NFTs, and broader involvement from the institutional community are all strong indicators that Web3 has passed a major installation milestone,” Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said.
Polygon is also aiming to boost its gaming and NFT presence, hiring YouTube’s former head of gaming Ryan Wyatt earlier this year to lead Polygon Studios.
(Reporting by Lisa Pauline Mattackal in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)
