This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
It’s been a busy week for VC raises, and some of the projects have caught heat around social media for being infra plays.
Like Unto Labs, for example.
“We definitely got bucketed into the whole ‘another L1, oh no’ [discourse]. We felt a little sad about that, but we’ll just have to prove it. Because, in some ways, it’s true,” cofounder Will Yoo told me.
But both Yoo and cofounder Liam Heeger said they’re up to the challenge because they’ve both “done this before,” whereas other teams haven’t “built systems that are supposed to perform at extremely high levels of scale.”
“We love Solana and we think they’re going to be an incredible competitor. We’d be honored to compete with them,” Yoo said. They’ll be “ripping” out the Solana virtual machine with Thru, and they argue that they won’t be competing with Jump’s Solana client — something that’s literally held up in court.
Heeger is ex-Jump Crypto, but he didn’t leave without making some waves. Jump filed a suit against Heeger after he departed Firedancer to start Unto with Yoo. The case was dismissed in February, and the two told me that they had a term sheet from Electric Capital, which led their seed round, the next day.
They wouldn’t comment further on the litigation.
The $14.4 million rounds are a combined pre-seed and seed raises. Framework Ventures led their pre-seed.
The capital will go towards building out the core infrastructure on Thru and the ecosystem around it, which they expect to be “capital-intensive, but because [Thru’s] going first-party rather than third-party, we believe we can be capital-efficient.”
The two, in Thru’s manifesto, argued that blockchains “have lost their way.”
“Thru’s consensus scales through competition, not accumulation. Operators earn their spot with uptime, throughput, and by relentlessly pushing fees toward zero, not by how much stake they can attract,” it said. The goal is to not only compete with other Web3 projects, but also to compete with Web2.
