San Francisco-based blockchain developer Movement Labs has raised $38 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital.
The funding is expected to support the mission to integrate Facebook’s Move Virtual Machine into Ethereum (ETH). This will address vulnerabilities in smart contracts and improve transaction speeds, the company said.
In this funding round, we attracted investments from renowned venture capital firms including Hack VC, Placeholder, Figment Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Aptos Labs.
According to Movement Labs, from 2022 to 2023, the Ethereum ecosystem has experienced a total loss of more than $5.4 billion due to smart contract abuse.
The startup’s Move-EVM product is designed to prevent such attacks by allowing developers to deploy code that undergoes real-time validation, effectively blocking attack vectors such as re-entrancy.
Move is a Rust-based programming language developed by Facebook for the Diem blockchain cryptocurrency payment project, which was discontinued in 2022.
It is designed to work on any platform and provides a framework for writing secure smart contracts used in cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized applications (apps).
A busy year for Movement Labs
Movement Labs has been driving Move adoption since securing a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023.
Key contributors to the fund included Varys Capital, Blizzard’s Avalanche Fund, dao5, Borderless Capital, and other entities within the Wormhole developer ecosystem.
Participating angel investors include Ankr’s Chandler Song, Ryan Fang, and Stanley Wu, as well as dao5’s George Lampeth and Eigenlayer’s Calvin Liu.
Funding from the pre-seed round was also intended to introduce the Movement SDK, a tool to make it easier to create a secure and performant Move environment for existing blockchains.
Additionally, earlier this year, Movement Labs partnered with Covalent (CQT), a multichain indexer integrated across 225 chains, to bring real-time data indexing and distribution tools, including Covalent’s unified API and GoldRush Kit, to the Movement ecosystem.
Covalent’s unified API provides seamless access to real-time and historical blockchain data, making it an essential tool for AI on the web3. The GoldRush kit enhances the user experience by providing a user-friendly interface for accessing and visualizing historical blockchain data within the Movement Labs ecosystem.