Rollup development platform Gelato raises $11 million in latest funding round

Rollup-as-a-Service platform Gelato has raised $11 million in a Series A+ funding round led by Hack VC, with participation from Animoca Brands, IOSG Ventures and Bloccelerate VC, among others.

With the fresh capital in place, Gelato is expanding its team and service to support more enterprise-grade rollups, aiming to become the “go-to platform” for startups to launch their own blockchains, according to a statement shared with The Block.

This includes Kraken’s newly unveiled Ink Layer 2 blockchain, which is set to launch on the mainnet in early 2025. Ink will join the broader Ethereum ecosystem as part of the Superchain, a network of interoperable Layer 2 blockchains built using Optimism's OP Stack. This follows the lead of rival crypto exchange Coinbase’s launch of Base in 2023.

The latest round brings Gelato’s total fundraising to $23.2 million, following an $11 million Series A token sale round in 2021 led by Dragonfly Capital and $1.2 million in earlier seed funding led by IOSG Ventures and Galaxy Digital. The Series A+ round was structured as a series of over-the-counter deals with investors, with average valuations above that of its Series A, Hilmar Orth, founder of Gelato, told The Block.

Drawing parallels with Amazon Web Services, Gelato aims to streamline the creation and management of integrated rollups, simplifying how web3 applications and ecosystems are built and scaled.

“The idea that a single blockchain can scale to support all future on-chain applications is outdated. Instead, we envision a future with millions of interconnected chains, each scaling their onchain apps independently,” Orth said. “Just like web2 server applications are deployed on AWS, web3 rollup applications are deploying on Gelato.”

“We are excited to join this funding round. We believe rollups are essential for scaling web3, and we share Gelato’s vision of a future built on millions of rollups,” Hack VC Managing Partner Ed Roman said.

Beyond Ink, Gelato supports more than 50 rollups, including Fox News’ Layer 2 Verify, after it announced plans earlier this year to work with the rollup platform to transition from the Polygon PoS network to a dedicated ZK-powered blockchain for content verification.

Gelato claims to support more than 500 applications, including DeFi giants like Aave, Sky and Synthetix’s Infinex .