Washington-based Howard University has joined a $5.3 million seed round for Scale3 Labs, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm bidding to build faster, and more secure, blockchain nodes. The funding round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with Mysten Labs — a builder of so-called web3 infrastructure — participating.
“We are building the web3 observability and monitoring platform for blockchain nodes and networks,” said Scale3 CEO Ola Muse, who previously was director of engineering at crypto exchange Coinbase. Scale3 could perform some node updates in “less than 20 minutes,” a task that currently takes up to eight hours, according to Muse.
Humble Path
Howard University — a private, federally chartered historically black research university — runs an investing group. The Howard University Investment Group is a mid-large cap U.S. equity investment fund that additionally creates valuable real-world finance experience for the university’s students.
Last month, the university partnered with Fiserv, a fintech firm, and a Washington-based investment collective called humble ventures, to launch GrowHU Accelerator for entrepreneurs affiliated to historical black colleges and universities. Startups with
either $10,000 of monthly recurring revenue over the past six months or close to $1 million in lifetime sales are eligible.
Last year, Howard University joined an initiative with Base10 Partners, the largest black-led venture capital firm. The fund invests in leading pre-IPO startups and donates 50% of the fund’s carried interest directly to Howard University, and other historically black colleges and universities to create student scholarships and support university endowments.
Over the past year, Howard University has won combined grants of $26.5 million from five donors — Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, TIAA Foundation, Mastercard, Abbott Labs and PNC Bank.
Redpoint Raised $650M in April
San Francisco-based Redpoint Ventures is an investing giant founded by Travis Bryant. Since its inception in 1999, it has raised over $5 billion, and made over 700 portfolio investments and more than 150 exits.
Over the past year, Redpoint’s portfolio investments have included TwitterScan, 9 Count, Omni, Flexe, Proper, Railway, Primitives, Cribl, Monte Carlo, Bravado, Heartex, AcuityMD, Qualified.com, Saysh, Lilt, Dagger, Hex Technologies, Ramp, Xata.io, Owner.com, fabric, Signadot, Timescale, Anvyl, Wander and Logixboard. Its most recent fund worth $650 million was raised in April.
“Scale3 has stepped up to provide a solution for the web3 community at a critical time,” said Redpoint’s Urvashi Barooah. “The Scale3 team has expertise building observability tooling from their time at Coinbase, and now they are moving quickly to productize it for a broader market.”
Engineering Creds
Scale3 was founded by Ola Muse, who has held top engineering jobs at Coinbase, Dropbox and Fastly, and Karthik Kalyanaraman, who worked alongside Muse at Coinbase. The startup wants to build robust web3 infrastructure, starting with faster, and more secure and reliable, blockchain nodes. Muse and Kalyanaraman believe much of web3 is being built with web2 assumptions. This, they think, is a key conceptual flaw that leads to suboptimal design choices for the internet of the future.
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Scale3’s first product is Autopilot, a dashboard to monitor and maintain blockchain nodes and networks. Autopilot also provides support to a key investor’s blockchain — Mysten Labs’ Sui. It expects to similarly support the top 10 blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana and Aptos, over the next six months.
“The DevOps for blockchain nodes are a challenge for every node operator, including exchanges, custodians, L1 foundations, staking providers, and node infrastructure providers,” said Muse. Kalyanaraman has pledged to bring “our experience and knowledge to solve this problem,” leveraging best practices and best-in-class open-source tools.
“Simplifying the operational processes associated with maintaining blockchain nodes is key to ensuring the smooth, reliable and scalable operation of decentralized networks,” said Adeniyi Abiodun, chief product officer of Mysten Labs.
