Wormhole garners whopping $2.5B valuation as new unit emerges

Cross-chain protocol Wormhole has formally launched a product development-focused unit in tandem with a $225 million fundraise.

The raise gives the interoperability platform a $2.5 billion valuation, the company said in a Wednesday announcement.

Wormhole is backed by investors including Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital and Arrington Capital. It was not immediately clear which investors participated in the latest round.

“We’re laser-focused on bringing solutions to market that solve real problems for our customers and end-users, and are on a mission to enable real-world impact from the Web3 space,” Wormhole Foundation Chief Commercial Officer Robinson Burkey said in a statement.

The Wormhole Foundation also revealed the formal launch of Wormhole Labs Wednesday — an independent tech company to be led by Saeed Badreg. The executive’s LinkedIn page says he has been working as Wormhole Labs’ CEO since August.

Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Badreg, along with fellow Wormhole executive — Chief Operating Officer Anthony Ramirez — had split from Jump Crypto to run the protocol as an independent entity.

Since launching in 2021, Wormhole has transferred roughly $35 billion in value. It routinely processes 2 million cross-chain messages across 30-plus chains daily, according to the company.

The protocol was hacked for roughly $320 million last year — at which time Jump Trading crypto arm Jump Crypto stepped in to replace the funds.

Badreg said in a statement that Wormhole was founded with the vision of a world in which large companies increasingly use public and private blockchains. Such a transformation has started to take shape via the tokenization of real-world assets, for example — or as blockchains are used for other use cases to boost efficiency and lower costs.

Badreg added: “We reaffirmed our commitment to this vision by launching Wormhole Labs, dedicated to advancing the technology that makes efficient blockchain-to-blockchain communication possible.”

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