Celo Ecosystem Projects Raise Over $77 Million in Funding to Support Financial Inclusion, Interoperability, Regenerative Finance (ReFi), and More

Companies like impactMarket, Loam, Tatum, and Hyperlane secure new venture milestones for mainstream adoption of Web3

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Celo’s growing ecosystem of mission-aligned companies, including Loam, impactMarket, Circular Impact, Hyperlane, RedStone, Jia, and Tatum, has raised $77.3 million in funding to further global adoption of Web3 by everyday users around the world across various use cases.

“Great entrepreneurs can raise in any market,” says Rene Reinsberg, Celo Co-Founder and Celo Foundation President. “I am immensely proud of our ecosystem projects in raising over $77 million across various venture rounds. This demonstrates how bullish investor sentiment is in driving mainstream adoption of Web3 and real-world use cases for real people.”

Hyperlane, an interchain communication protocol and application development platform, raised $18.5 million in seed funding, led by early-stage crypto venture capital fund Variant. Promoting cross-chain communication and interoperable security, Hyperlane will provide developers with infrastructure to build better interchain applications.

“Our mission at Hyperlane is to connect blockchains with seamless interfaces for developers so that they can serve users on any chain, and we’re thrilled to bring our interoperability capabilities to the vibrant developer ecosystem on Celo,” said Jon Kol, co-founder at Hyperlane. Asa Oines and Nam Chu Hoai, also co-founders at Hyperlane, were among the Celo platform’s first engineers at cLabs.

ReFi projects have also raised a collective $6 million, including Loam ($4M), which aims to create a marketplace for farming data to incentivize farmers to engage in regenerative practices; impactMarket ($1M), which unlocks access to finance and implements human empowerment mechanisms, like Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) for vulnerable communities; and Circular Impact ($1M), a platform built in partnership with Sanergy, which will enable circular economy companies to quantify and monetize their positive impact using Web3 infrastructure, starting with carbon.

"As a ReFi project, there's no better place to build than Celo," says Birju Shah, Loam CEO. "Celo's ecosystem is staunchly committed to building a regenerative world, and cares deeply about helping people and the planet––as with Loam's community of farmers across the U.S., Brazil, Europe, India, and Africa––and creating the conditions of prosperity for all."

Decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, including RedStone, which delivers frequently updated, diverse data for dapps and smart contracts, raised $7 million; Jia, which provides blockchain-based financing to businesses in emerging markets, raised $4.3 million in pre-seed funding.

Blockchain development platform Tatum, an early Celo Foundation grantee, has also secured $41.5 million. "The Celo ecosystem has been supporting Tatum from the very beginning, committed to our mission to revolutionize blockchain application creation, and integrating our tooling platform for their Web3 projects," Tatum CEO Jiri Kobelka says. “We’re proud to be partners in this dynamic and fast-growing ecosystem of creators and builders.” Blockchain SaaS startup MakerDojo, which also supports Celo, further raised $1.5M in pre-seed funding, led by Leo Capital.

Other Celo ecosystem projects currently raising funds include Celo entrepreneur-in-residence Michael Keating, formerly the founder and CEO of Scoot, who is launching a new electric mobility venture, and Mento, a decentralized stability protocol powering stable assets on the Celo blockchain, among others.

Building on the leading carbon-negative Celo platform allows founders and builders to access 18.6+ million wallet addresses in over 150 countries around the world; the network aims to bring Web3 to every mobile device by mapping encrypted phone numbers to wallet addresses and providing access to an ecosystem of dapps via low-powered smartphone devices.

About the Celo Foundation
The Celo Foundation was founded to support the growth and development of the decentralized, open source, mobile-first Celo platform to help build a carbon-negative financial system that creates the conditions of prosperity for all. The Foundation is guided by the Celo community tenets and contributes to education, technical research, environmental health, community engagement, and ecosystem outreach—activities that support and encourage an inclusive financial system. For more about Celo, visit https://celo.org/.