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Helius
I’m excited to announce our lead investment in Helius alongside Founders Fund and existing investors Foundation Capital, Chapter One, and 6th Man Ventures.
We’ve been supporters of Solana since the launch of Haun Ventures. From day one, Solana has optimized its network for shared state, low latency, and high transaction throughput. Solana has proved to be particularly well suited for applications such as social, payments, and trading that can leverage its strengths.
This year has been an important one for the Solana ecosystem. Solana has seen all-time highs in users, transactions, priority fees, and dex volume. When speaking to teams building on Solana during this period of growth, it didn’t matter if they were building a social app, a DePIN protocol, or a DeFi protocol, one common infrastructure provider always came up: Helius.
Helius is a Solana-first developer platform led by cofounders Mert Mumtaz, Nick Pennie, and Liam Vovk. The three met while studying Math and Communications Engineering at Queen’s University. Prior to starting Helius, Mert was on the engineering team at Coinbase. At the same time, Liam and Nick were building backend systems at Amazon—Liam on the ad product, Nick on AWS.
Two years ago, when they founded Helius, they were entering a crowded indexing and RPC provider space. Facing competition that was both better funded and more entrenched, they made a big bet to focus solely on the Solana ecosystem. As usage on Solana ramped, this strategic decision paid off, enabling Helius to more deeply embed itself within the ecosystem and move extremely quickly to solve acute developer pain points that arose as usage on the network scaled.
For instance last year, when consumer product teams were struggling to issue NFTs to their users at scale, the Helius team worked in lockstep with the Solana Foundation and others in the ecosystem to implement the spec for compressed NFTs. Over 500 million compressed NFTs have been issued since the launch of that protocol, and many of the leading NFT platforms rely on Helius to power their offering.
Earlier this year, when Solana experienced widespread network congestion, Helius was the first provider to implement stake-weighted quality of service. In tandem, Helius quickly bootstrapped what is now the #1 validator on the network to increase the likelihood of speedy transaction confirmation for its users.
Helius is trusted to provide core infrastructure such as data APIs, RPCs, and webhooks to hundreds of projects on Solana. Along the way, they have proved themselves as the infrastructure provider of choice to take on some of the most ambitious developer-focused challenges in the ecosystem. In the quest to bring 1 billion users onchain, Solana’s infrastructure challenges will only become more demanding and we believe Helius will continue to play a pivotal role. We’re already looking forward to their efforts to power generalized compression and new SVM networks and extensions like Atlas.
We’re excited to support Mert, Nick, and Liam and the rest of the Helius team in their mission to accelerate developer adoption of crypto.
