Hemi Labs, a startup co-founded by former Bitcoin Core developer and Bloq co-founder Jeff Garzik, has raised $15 million in its first funding round. Led by Binance Labs, Breyer Capital, and Big Brain Holdings, the company says it plans to combine the power of Bitcoin and Ethereum into one “super network.”
Hemi Labs launched at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville in July of this year touting new technology that integrates Bitcoin within the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The goal is to allow Ethereum smart contracts to communicate directly with Bitcoin, filling a technology gap that has existed since its inception.
Co-founder Max Sanchez said the company plans to use the funds to build out Hemi's engineering team, add Bitcoin interoperability features, provide advanced customization features to developers, incentives, grants, and community adoption. Sanchez did not disclose the company's valuation.
Sanchez joined Bloq's Gargic incubator program in 2016, where he co-founded a company called VeriBlock. The venture was unsuccessful, but Sanchez applied the technology he developed to Hemi, which uses a proprietary consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Proof.
“This is an evolution of the technology that we built with Proof-of-Proof,” Sanchez said, “and putting it on a chain that will make sense in 2024 instead of 2017.”
Sanchez said that for now, the company is most popular with web developers and computer scientists, but he hopes it will soon be adopted by a wider audience. He explained that Hemi is the place to be for anyone wanting to do decentralized finance using Bitcoin and Ethereum assets.
Hemi isn't the first company to try to bridge this gap: In July, two startups, ByBit Web3 and Ignition, announced a partnership to give users a way to integrate Bitcoin and Ethereum in a DeFi-based way. Sanchez believes Hemi differs from these and other companies because it uses newer technology and goes beyond the two blockchains' respective communities.
Additional investors in this round include Crypto.com, Web3 Ventures, Hyperchain Capital, Alchemy and SALT Fund.
“The Hemi team has a clear and compelling vision for unlocking the programmability, portability and potential of Web3,” said Ted Breyer of Breyer Capital, an early investor in Facebook and Spotify. “With their strong track record, they're uniquely positioned to make it happen.”