Berachain Secures $42 Million Series A at $420.69M Valuation, Boosting DeFi-focused Layer 1

Decentralized finance (DeFi)-focused layer 1 blockchain Berachain has succeeded in raising a total of $42 million under its recently completed Series A funding round at a valuation of some $420.69 million.

Led by Polychain Capital, the funding round enabled Berachain to source capital from a numbet of investors. These included Hack VC, CitizenX, Dao5, Tribe Capital, Robot Ventures, and Shima Capital, as well as “multiple centralized exchange venture funds,” the blockchain announced in a tweet. 

In reaction to the latest development, Berachain’s pseudonomous co-founder Smokey the Bera tweeted that more than “a year and a half ago, Papa and I were joking about making NFTs of bears smoking weed. And today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $42.0M from some of the best crypto investors and angels in the game to build the first protocol which truly aligns liquidity and security.”

“We’ve got the opportunity to draw in assets from every EVM and Cosmos chain to build the deepest and most capital efficient pools in existence, giving users all of the depth and velocity of capital of a CEX combined with the transparency and customizable nature of an on-chain eco,” the co-founder said. “And perhaps more than anything else, it’s coming together because of the community – the thousands of crazy mfs creating pastas on Discord and building dapps without even a testnet”.

Berachain eyes new hires for its team

It is noteworthy that Berachain used the latest development as an opportunity to advertise it is looking to expand its team with new hires, with a number of positions available for those willing to join the blockchain’s staff. Among others, Berachain aims to recruit a new UI/UX designer, product managers, software engineers, developers, a data scientist, as well as a quantitative analyst, according to the blockchain’s careers page. 

The job ads state that Berachain’s “team combines traditional experience in building and scaling teams at technology companies like Apple, Coinbase, IBM and Y-Combinator with crypto native experience from some of DeFi 2.0’s most impactful protocols. We’re all highly passionate about Web3, Toybox and building infrastructure to bring decentralized finance to the masses”. 

The blockchain says its core engineering team is based in Canada’s largest city Toronto. 

“Berachain is a high-performance, EVM compatible L1 Blockchain, looking to challenge the traditional Proof-of-Stake ethos. We’re a young, world-class team of experts in computer science, mathematics, economic game theory, and enterprise software development,” according to the blockchain.