Solana Blockchain Explorer and indexing provider SolanaFM has raised $4.5 million during a seed funding round led by Japanese financial services company SBI Group’s Digital Asset Opportunity Fund.
Other investors involved within the round include Spartan Group, Mirana Ventures, D1 Ventures and Petrock Capital, per a handout on Friday.
The Singapore-based startup formed out of a Solana hackathon where co-founders Nicholas Chen, Bing Huang and Fathur Rahman decided to specialize in infrastructure solutions for the blockchain.
This resulted in SolanaFM, which has two core tools. the primary is an indexer, which enables people to collect and access Solana data at a highly efficient rate, Rahman said. The second may be a blockchain explorer to look at and interact with Solana data, he added.
A blockchain explorer enables individuals to question information stored on the blockchain. one amongst the foremost well-known blockchain explorers is Etherscan.
“Etherscan really did an honest job in building out a really simple explorer,” Rahman said.
SolanaFM wants to elevate this experience for the Solana ecosystem, creating a more user friendly and visual experience that may help bring “normies” into the ecosystem, Rahman said.
“We built it solely because we felt there was a problem right there which we’d like to mend it,” Rahman said. The indexer are going to be the predominant way the startup earns revenue through indexing as a service, Rahman added.
The funds from the new raise are going to be leveraged to scale SolanaFM and invest in hiring. The startup also secured an undisclosed amount during a funding round led by Etherscan and Coinhako in December.
Expanding to Aptos
Despite the naming, SolanaFM is blockchain agnostic, Rahman said. The startup is exploring launching similar tooling on the Aptos blockchain alongside existing services on Solana.
“Once you build an explorer, and folks am passionate about it and that we know that folks find it irresistible then it sticks with them, [so] it is smart for us to truly expand into Aptos in addition,” Rahman said. “They already known a way to interact with it in Solana, so once they get into Aptos, it is a similar experience.”
Aptos may be a new Layer 1 blockchain that formed out of Facebook’s Diem blockchain project. It’s raised a complete of $350 million in funding this year with a Series A in July and a seed round in March.
The blockchain’s most up-to-date fundraise occurred at a challenging time in venture funding. Blockchain venture funding declined 22% from $12.5 billion within the half-moon to $9.8 billion within the second quarter of this year, per The Block Research.
