Pontem, a product development studio focusing on Move and EVM-compatible products for a safer, more performant, and developer-friendly Web3, has successfully concluded a $6 million funding round. The investment was co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Pantera Capital, Aptos Foundation, Wintermute, Altonomy, Shima Capital, Kraken Ventures, and other investors.
Pontem aims to utilize the funds to support the development of Move Virtual Machine (VM) products on EVM-compatible blockchains, including Ethereum and the new Move L2 Lumio. Move, a programming language derived from Rust, facilitates the creation of secure and highly efficient smart contracts. Pontem began its journey in the Move ecosystem in 2019 and has since become a leader in developing infrastructure for Move on top of Aptos, which attracted over $800 million in collective investments.
Move stands out by offering enhanced throughput through parallel processing compared to Ethereum’s native virtual machine that uses Solidity. Pontem plans to foster language diversity within Ethereum’s architecture and also support other blockchain languages like SVM (Solana VM). The funds raised will also contribute to the launch of the new Move L2 Lumio, an Optimistic rollup on Ethereum that leverages alternative L1s such as Aptos for transaction processing.
Pontem previously raised $4.5 million in June 2021 through a private token sale led by Mechanism Capital and Kenetic Capital, alongside Delphi Ventures and Animoca Brands. With the recent $6 million funding round, Pontem’s total funds raised reach $10.5 million. The technology behind Pontem was initially developed by team members of Aptos, an organization consisting of former members of the Diem project.
