Gear Technologies, Building Efficient Smart Contract Support for the Polkadot Ecosystem, Raises $12 Million in Venture Round
Gear Technologies announced today it has raised $12 million in a private investment round led by Blockchange Ventures. Gear Technologies is the developer of the Gear Network, a smart contract support layer that will make accessing the Polkadot ecosystem more efficient and less expensive.
“We are incredibly excited to lead this round of funding for Gear Technologies. The Gear team has proven to be innovative, professional and best positioned to offer cutting edge, efficient, smart contract support for the Polkadot ecosystem. We are inspired by the new possibilities that Gear Technologies will bring to the blockchain industry,” said Ken Seiff, CEO of Blockchange.
In addition to Blockchange, other top venture capital funds participated in this round, including Three Arrows Capital, Lemniscap, Distributed Globals, LAO, Mechanism Capital, Bitscale, Spartan Group LLC, HashKey, DI Ventures, Elysium Venture Capital, Signum Capital and P2P Economy lead by Konstantin Lomashuk, along with a number of top executives of Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies.
Gear is an advanced WASM-based smart contract platform, which enables developers to deploy their dApps in the fastest, easiest, and most efficient way possible. The Gear Network was designed to become the leading Polkadot and Kusama parachain, enabling users to interact seamlessly with the entire emerging Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem and take advantage of all its benefits, with minimal financial and time costs.
“For the blockchain to go mainstream, it will be necessary to strip away the complexity of building on top of it and enable millions of engineers and companies to bring to life their visions. Gear is a key ingredient to simplifying building blockchain apps. We are incredibly excited to back this strong team and are inspired by the new advances that Gear Technologies will bring to the blockchain industry,” said Seiff.
Gear provides a novel way to program dApps without any domain-specific features. At launch, the Gear team will deliver the most reliable and efficient Polkadot/Kusama smart contract product that meets the requirements of modern trust and security realities.
Nikolay Volf, Founder and CEO of Gear Technologies and a former senior engineer at Parity Technologies which developed Polkadot said, “We are thrilled with the support we have received from the key leaders in our industry in this venture round. Simply put, Gear will make it seamless and easy for anyone to access and build on the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem — allowing the ecosystem to be much more open and accessible to the millions of engineers with big ideas.”
Dr. Gavin Wood, Founder and CEO of Parity Technologies and one of the key individual investors participating in this round, commented: “I am happy to support the Gear team with their infrastructure efforts — and I believe it will benefit our entire ecosystem.”
Gear’s new funding will go towards further development and promotion of the Gear product. In the coming months, Gear plans to launch a stable test network, successfully pass all security and economic audits, and become a parachain on the Kusama network.
“We are thrilled to be seeing incredible progress with our product and look forward to the launch of our Stable test net, as well as to passing third party security and financial audits in 2022,” said Volf.
