Rollup-in-a-Box Startup Caldera Raises $15M From Peter Thiel's Venture Fund

Caldera, a "rollup-as-a-service" platform that helps developers quickly spin up layer-2 blockchains, has closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

CEO Matt Katz said in an interview with CoinDesk that the new funds will help him expand Caldera's 15-person team so they can build out the Metalayer, an interoperability ecosystem meant to simplify the process of launching applications across multiple blockchains.

Today, Caldera provides a simple interface for launching layer-2 "rollup" chains that record data to Ethereum but offer quicker and cheaper transactions. The Caldera product suite plugs into popular rollup-building frameworks like those from Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon; developers can select a rollup ecosystem and then swap out components to support whatever use case they're building for.

Read more: What Are Rollups? ZK Rollups and Optimistic Rollups Explained

"Many blockchain projects face growing challenges in deploying and maintaining rollups due to the high costs, slow processes and risks associated with hiring protocol and site reliability engineers," Caldera explained in a statement. "Caldera solves this by enabling projects to deploy a rollup with a single click, eliminating the need for an in-house engineering team."

Caldera's Series A round included participation from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital, Arkstream Capital and Lattice. It brings the total funding of the firm, which was founded in 2022, to $25 million.

The new fundraising comes amid a period of rapid expansion for Ethereum's layer-2 ecosystem, with rollup chains rapidly outpacing the layer-1 Ethereum chain in terms of overall network activity. "Everybody's launching a chain right now," said Katz.

Builders have raced to respond to the demand from Ethereum's layer-2 boom: Early rollup teams, like those behind the popular Arbitrum and Optimism chains, have released readymade templates for developers to build their own interoperable blockchains. New "data availability" layers, like Celestia and EigenDA, have emerged to warehouse the massive troves of transaction data generated by all the new blockchains.

More recently, as liquidity has become fragmented between myriad disparate layer-2 ecosystems, Polygon's AggLayer and the Elastic Chain from zkSync have launched to help capital flow more efficiently between different networks.

Katz says Caldera and its new Metalayer initiative are designed to complement the growing world of layer-2 infrastructure components rather than compete with them head-on.

"If you're developing for multi-chain, you're developing for a million individual chains all at the same time," he explained. "We want Metalayer to be an entry point for folks who are developing apps and developing infrastructure to basically get deployed onto all Caldera chains – and hopefully all rollups on Ethereum – at the same time."