Algorand to Expand After Netting USD 62 Million in Funding Round

By Swati Kishore

As per a press release published on October 24, 2018, Algorand, the Blockchain startup founded by Silvio Micali, has raised as much as USD 62 million in a new funding round. Micali is not only a professor at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is also a winner of the Turing Award. The release states that the funding comes from a global investment group which represents the cryptocurrency, financial services, and venture capital community.

Founded in 2017, Algorand solves the “blockchain trilemma” with a platform that delivers decentralization, scalability and security.  Micali, a cryptography pioneer, released the proof of stake protocol for Algorand in 2017. With the new investment on its plate, the Blockchain startup aims to expand its core engineering team as the days come closer to the launch of the protocol.

As opposed to famous public Blockchain networks such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc., which provide Blocks as rewards to the miners, the Algorand protocol differs in the sense that no incentives are provided. Micali said that Algorand was designed with the view of achieving security as well as scalability. As per the cryptography pioneer ‘The end goal is to make the protocol usable by big firms’.

This round of funding comes comes few months post the company’s USD 4 million seed funding round which was carried by the Pillar and Union Square Ventures. At the time of the seed funding, Algorand stated that the firm was focusing on increasing the size of its development team for a planned roll out at the end of 2018. Algorand’s test network was launched in July 2018, while the open source code was released on Github just this month.

To bag the USD 62 million funding, the company announced that it had recruited senior management from tech firms to lead the operations of Algorand and take it forward. Consequently, W.Sean Ford, Former SMO of Boston-based software company, has come on board of Algorand as the Chief Operating Officer, while Steve Kokinos, Former Co-Founder of the cloud service company, Fuze, is now the Chief Executive Officer of Algorand.