Chapter One is excited to announce that we have co-led the seed round of Helius alongside our friends at Reciprocal Ventures, supported by a strong number of funds and angel investors.

Secure, reliable, and fast APIs power the tech world that we live in today. They are even more important in the Web3 ecosystem as the next evolution of software is being constructed at record speeds and rely on blockchain-based information.

The Solana ecosystem has proved out its thesis through a strong eye for design and speed, but the ecosystem has displayed a need for a fast-scaling business to provide underlying infrastructure that other chains take for granted. API indexing and low-latency webhooks will be the backbone of all innovation and development technology stacks.

Web3 developers are constantly looking for new tools to create efficient breakthroughs to enable teams to focus on what they do best and leave the data parsing and abstraction layer to the partners that do this best.

What’s so exciting about this infrastructure focus area is that the new internet that we call Web3 will be able to reach its potential at a much faster pace by relying on data providers that have built bundled products with node access, querying support, and one-click code solutions.

Where does the next wave of API products shine?

It is clear that there have been several ecosystem leaders but they’ve become more and more generalized as the space has matured. Whether it’s technical debt or overwhelming priorities, current providers are struggling to meet client demands. The need for specialized APIs is in high demand.

Why Solana?

Solana is seen as one of the highest performant blockchains, steadily processing over 2,000 transactions per second. Since Solana is not the most developer-friendly L1 compared to the EVM stack, there have been few leaders that specialize in the data programming side of the business.

Why Helius?

Helius aims to solve these problems by reverse engineering all transactions & accounts on the Solana blockchain and exposing them via highly queryable APIs and low-latency webhooks — which the team is releasing today. Currently, developers and teams spend hours, weeks, or months setting up costly indexing infrastructure and transaction/account decoders to build on Solana. With Helius, developers can spin up powerful applications & workflows on Solana within mere seconds.

Since announcing a closed, invite-only alpha two months ago, Helius has already served almost 400 developers and 20M API requests, with over 1500 others waiting for open beta access on the waitlist. Some notable teams utilizing Helius in production today are Crossmint, Formfunction, Famous Fox Federation, Netrunner, and some large hedge funds.

Meet the Team

In addition to the strong vision that Helius holds, the founding team is extremely unique and positioned very well within the ecosystem. Not only is the co-founding team Mert, Nick, and Liam tightly integrated in the Solana ecosystem, but they also hail from strong engineering backgrounds at Coinbase and AWS where they have specialized in API infrastructure for several years. They’ve spent their careers identifying areas of improvement for this space and they are ready to realize these solutions at Helius. We at Chapter One could not be more excited to back them.

How can you get started?

If you are a developer looking for decoded transactions, NFT APIs, flexible querying, webhooks, websockets, and powerful RPCs, head over to the Helius website to get started.

Welcome to the Chapter One family, Helius!

LFG

Jack Lipstone

Investment Partner, Chapter One