On October 19, Helius, the Solana infrastructure startup announced that it raised a $3.1 million seed round co-led by Chapter One and Reciprocal Ventures, with an aim to give the tools to help developers build Web3 applications quicker than expected and for less money. 

Co-founded by engineers formerly of Amazon Web Services and Coinbase, Helius raised funds from various eminent VCs, including Alchemy Ventures, Solana Ventures, Big Brain Ventures, and Propel VC, among different firms, alongside angels like Zhuoxun Yin, Magic Eden co-founder and Stepan Simkin, co-founder of Squads. 

The co-founder and CEO of Helius, Mert Mumtaz told that he began building tools for the Solana ecosystem in the summer 2021, in front of the surge of the platform in value and attention. The former Coinbase engineer created arbitrage bots and tooling for DAOs, and helped with tracking scammers, yet said that Solana is a troublesome platform to expand on. 

“The Solana blockchain is quite hard to work with and understand, especially compared to Ethereum,” Mumtaz explained. “We're trying to simplify blockchain data and make it easy to work with and build on top of.” 

Building an application on Solana commonly expects developers to “set up all sorts of infrastructure and scaffolding first,” Mumtaz explained—and additionally, the on-chain transactions are exceptionally difficult to peruse. He said that at times, engineers have to reverse engineer Solana smart contracts (the code that powers autonomous applications) to comprehend what’s actually occurring. 

Helius means to assist creators to leapfrog those obstacles by giving APIs (application programming interfaces) to grasp on-chain data and query transactions, as well as webhooks that enable automation and bots, in addition to the RPC nodes that let Solana apps cooperate with the blockchain. With everything taken into account, they’re intended to digest away intricacy and smooth out application development. 

“It will allow developers to build much faster and cheaper,” said Mumtaz. “My hope is that people who are intimidated by crypto development, and people who are coming over from Web2 to Web3, will have a much smoother, easier, and faster onboarding experience to crypto—but also Solana specifically, as well.”