Solana infrastructure startup Helius has raised $3.1 million from a seed round. The funding round was led by Chapter One and Reciprocal Ventures. Other firms also participated in the round, including Big Brain Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Solana Venture, and Propel VC. According to Helius, the funding will be used to hire additional engineers and cover the costs of infrastructure.

Helius was co-founded by former Amazon Web Services and Coinbase engineers. The company was established to create tools that will enable developers to build Web3 applications with less money and in less time.

Helius To Enable Developers To Build Faster Platforms

Chief Executive Officer of Helius, Mert Mumtaz, commented on the funding. Mumtaz said he started developing tools for the Solana ecosystem in the summer of 2021 before the platform surged in value and popularity. He created arbitrage bots for DAOs, as well as developing tools that tracked scammers. But he admitted that the Solana blockchain is easy to work with.

“The Solana blockchain is quite hard to work with and understand, especially compared to Ethereum,” he stated. Mumtaz says the team is looking to develop a more simplified process that will make it easy to build on and work with.

He added that developers would need to set up scaffolding and infrastructure before building an app on Solana. And in some situations, the job will require developers to reverse engineer Solana smart contracts.

Mumtaz says Helius is helping creators to scale through those challenges by creating APIs to understand query and on-chain data transactions. These have enabled developers to build much cheaper and faster platforms. It is also providing a much simpler solution for people that believe that developments in the crypto environment are very complex.

Helius Onboards More Developers

Helius has opened public access to its platform after launching an invite-only alpha in August. The firm noted that more than 400 developers have been onboarded on the platform, including the NFT project Famous For Federation and cross-platform NFT firm Crossmint.

Mumtaz has been in the industry for a long time. Before founding Helius, he co-developed a multi-chain developer platform with his former Coinbase colleague Carl Cortright. However, both developers later parted ways and pursued different projects. While Muntaz took up the development of Helius, Cortright went ahead to fund Coherent, a platform that offers a wide range of similar-sounding tools on Ethereum blockchain.