Arcana Network, a blockchain startup focused on decentralised storage and data privacy platform, said it has raised 2.3 million (Rs 17 crore) in a financing round led by Republic Crypto and Woodstock Fund with participation from Digital Currency Group (DCG), Hyperedge, Sahil Lavingia's shl.vc, Fenbushi Capital, LD Capital, and Paradigm Shift VC.
The round also saw Ganesh Swami, CEO of Covalent, Ajeet Khurana, Builders Tribe, Nishal Shetty of WazirX, Ajit Tripathi from Aave, along with Arcana’s seed investors AU21 and Arcanum Capital.
The company raised this round in less than a quarter since their $375,000 seed funding round.
With the fresh capital, Arcana aims to expand its team, strengthen its product portfolio and launch Arcana's XAR token. The company also plans to invest in community building.
“More than 60% of the strategic fund raised would be devoted to build the community and develop a robust platform that will help app developers from easily authenticating users who can carry their keys and identity while interacting with apps, to easily sharing and managing access to data,” co-founder Aravindh Kumar said.
Founded by Mayur Relekar, Kumar, and Abhishek Chaudhary in 2019, Arcana aims to be a decentralised storage option amongst the other storage platforms such as IPFS, Filecoin, and Storj among others.
Meanwhile, cryptocurrency adoption has also been growing in India, despite regulatory uncertainties. According to an October report from blockchain research firm Chainalysis, the country ranks amongst the top three in the world in terms of crypto adoption. Chainalysis noted that Indian investors were more mature than Pakistan and Vietnam — the other two in the top three — with more institutional investors joining the market.
Over the last year, crypto-related startups have gained investor attention. Backers like Coinbase Ventures, WazirX, Hypersphere have remained active in the segment.
Last week, India welcomed its second crypto unicorn CoinSwitch Kuber in less than two months after getting its first, CoinDCX.
In the same week, Stader Labs, a cryptocurrency staking management platform raised $4 million in its seed funding round led by Pantera Capital.
This week, NFTically, a SaaS-based NFT marketplace focused on launching white-label NFT stores secured under $1 million in a new seed round.
Last month, LayerZero, a multi-blockchain omnichannel interoperability protocol firm, raised a $6 million funding round co-led by Binance Labs, the venture capital firm and incubator of Binance, and Multicoin Capital.