In the midst of a crypto bear market, where investors are getting cautious and in India, where regulatory hurdles persist, Nischal Shetty co-founder of Shardeum, a layer-1 EVM-based shared blockchain startup has raised a seed round of $18.28 million (around Rs 150 crore) from 60 investors.

The round includes prominent investors such as Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, Foresight Ventures. Other notable strategic investors include CoinGecko Ventures, Wemade, ZebPay, Jsquare, MH Ventures, Nestcoin, Veris Ventures, Tupix Capital, Mapleblock Capital and NetZero Capital.

Many influential angel investors participated in the round, including Balaji Srinivasan, Mayur Gupta (CMO at Kraken), Michael Montero (Co-founder at Resy - acq. American Express and Co-Founder at CrowdTwist - acq. Oracle), Pankaj Gupta (VP Engineering at Coinbase), Harsh Rajat (Co-founder at Push Protocol), Nakul Gupta (Lead PM at Coinbase NFT Marketplace & Institutional Onboarding), Ajeet Khurana (Founder at Reflexical), Ravi Adusumalli (GP at Elevation Capital), Rohan Chauhan (Digital assets at Hudson River Trading), Ganesh Swami (Co-founder at Covalent), Kashif Raza (Founder at Bitinning), and more.

Nischal Shetty, also the founder of one of India’s leading crypto exchanges WazirX said that one of the reasons for raising money from a large number of investors was not to concentrate the tokens in the hands of a few investors. “We kept an upper limit of $1-2 million, so that we get more investors which keeps Shardeum as a decentralised project. The other reason is we want participation from across the globe,” added Shetty.

Founded in 2017 by blockchain architect Omar Syed Shardeum will be