After 2020, venture capital firms poured money into crypto startups at a pace nobody fully predicted. According to the Crunchbase Web3 Tracker, Web3 companies raised over $7.4 billion in 2024, and Q1 2025 brought in $4.8 billion, the strongest quarter since late 2022. Sequoia, SoftBank, and Andreessen Horowitz, along with crypto-native investors like Binance Labs, have stopped testing the waters.
Here are 10 VC-backed Web3 startups that have drawn the most significant capital, with updated funding numbers and where each stands in 2026.
1. Polygon
If you’ve ever wondered what sits between Ethereum and the apps built on top of it, Polygon is a big part of that answer. It takes the transaction load off Ethereum, processes it faster and at a fraction of the cost, then sends the final result back to settle on-chain. That unglamorous work is exactly why it attracted serious money, a $450 million token sale in February 2022 backed by Peak XV Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Tiger Global, and more than 40 other firms.
Since then, the network quietly became a go-to for institutions that wouldn’t have touched crypto a few years ago. BlackRock and Franklin Templeton both have live deployments on it. The MATIC-to-POL token migration wrapped up, AggLayer went live for cross-chain interoperability, and the project kept growing without much noise.
Now, as of April 2026, Polygon Labs is reportedly in early talks to raise between $50 million and $100 million to build out a stablecoin payments business. According to early reports, the company has signed deals to acquire Coinme and Sequence to support the pivot.
2. The Sandbox
The Sandbox lets users buy digital land as NFTs, build games on it, and trade the assets they own. Total funding across six rounds stands at $135 million, including a $93 million Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021 and a $20 million convertible note round in June 2024 at a $1 billion valuation cap.
The picture changed significantly in August 2025, when over 50% of the 250-person workforce was laid off, offices across five countries closed, and co-founders Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget were moved out of operational roles. Animoca Brands’ Robby Yung now leads the platform.
The company is pivoting to mobile with The Sandbox NEXT, a shooter built on Unreal Engine that entered playtesting in March 2026.
3. Yuga Labs
Yuga Labs created the Bored Ape Yacht Club and raised $450 million at a $4 billion valuation in a March 2022 seed round led by a16z, one of the largest seed rounds in startup history. In 2025, the company divested CryptoPunks, Meebits, and Moonbirds (collections it had previously acquired) to concentrate fully on BAYC and its metaverse, Otherside.
The Koda Nexus social hub launched on November 12, 2025, accessible by browser with no wallet required. Yuga partnered with Amazon Gaming for the Boximus avatar drop in October 2025.
In December 2025, it acquired Improbable’s Unreal Engine creator platform and developer team, bringing all Otherside development in-house. A land production and crafting economy called Resources is planned for 2026.
4. Alchemy
Alchemy is the infrastructure layer powering much of Web3. Its APIs handle the data requests and transaction submissions behind apps like OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and Axie Infinity. The company raised $250 million in a Series C led by a16z in October 2021, followed by a $200 million Series C-1 led by Lightspeed and Silver Lake in February 2022 at a $10.2 billion valuation. Total funding across five rounds stands at $564 million.
Alchemy expanded into smart wallets and stablecoin orchestration, opened an engineering office in Bucharest in late 2025, and in April 2026 launched a $20 million developer fund offering infrastructure credits to teams building on Solana.
5. OpenSea
OpenSea supports trading across 19 blockchains with $427 million in total funding. Its $300 million Series C from Paradigm and Coatue in January 2022 valued the company at $13.3 billion. The SEC closed its investigation in February 2025. An OS2 platform upgrade drove a 44% rise in user activity, and the July 2025 acquisition of Rally added token trading.
By October 2025, OpenSea was processing over $2.6 billion in monthly volume, with more than 90% coming from tokens rather than NFTs. The SEA governance token was delayed in March 2026 as CEO Devin Finzer opted to wait for stronger market conditions.
6. Consensys
Most people who have used Web3 have touched Consensys without knowing it. MetaMask, the wallet that quietly onboarded millions of people into crypto, is theirs. So is Infura, the API backbone that most Ethereum apps quietly depend on. MetaMask crossed 30 million monthly active users and added Bitcoin support in 2025, making it genuinely multi-chain for the first time. Funding has reached around $715 million, with the anchor being a $450 million Series D in March 2022 at a $7 billion valuation.
The company spent years under regulatory pressure, but the SEC dropped its lawsuit over MetaMask staking in February 2025. That cleared the path for what comes next. Reports indicate Consensys is working toward a mid-2026 IPO with JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs leading the process, which would make it the first company this close to Ethereum’s core infrastructure to go public.
7. Immutable
Gaming NFTs had a real problem before Immutable showed up. Every trade cost gas fees, which made owning in-game items feel more like a chore than a feature. Immutable built a Layer 2 specifically to fix that, bringing trading costs to zero and keeping everything settled on Ethereum. Over 660 games now run on the platform, including Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians, with 5.3 million Immutable Passport sign-ups recorded.
The Series C in March 2022 brought in $200 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, led by Temasek, pushing total funding past $285 million. A Mobile Gaming Division launched in September 2025 to go after the broader mobile market. The SEC closed its investigation in March 2026, and Immutable is now co-developing a game with Ubisoft.
8. EigenLayer (Eigen Labs)
Eigen Labs, the company behind EigenLayer, pioneered restaking, letting ETH already securing Ethereum simultaneously secure other decentralized applications. Founded in 2021 by Sreeram Kannan, the protocol attracted a $100 million Series B from a16z in February 2024. In June 2025, a16z invested an additional $70 million to back the launch of EigenCloud, a verifiable cloud platform that allows applications to run off-chain while anchoring trust and payments on Ethereum.
Total funding across four rounds stands at $241 million. The protocol currently secures over $12 billion in restaked assets, and Securitize is using EigenCloud to verify asset pricing data for BlackRock’s $2 billion BUIDL fund.
9. Monad
Building a faster blockchain that still works with everything on Ethereum sounds simple until you try to actually do it. Monad is taking that on, targeting 10,000 transactions per second with full Ethereum compatibility. The team came out of Jump Crypto, raised $225 million in a Series A led by Paradigm in April 2024 at a $3 billion valuation, and has $248 million in total funding.
Mainnet and the MON token both went live on November 24, 2025. The network reached $355 million in TVL faster than any Layer 1 in recent years. The founders also extended their vesting cliff to Q2 2026, which at least signals they are not in a rush to cash out.
10. Polymarket
Polymarket is a decentralized prediction market built on Polygon and settled in USDC. Trading volume surged from $73 million in 2023 to roughly $9 billion in 2024. According to reporting at the time, Intercontinental Exchange, parent of the New York Stock Exchange, invested $2 billion at a pre-money valuation of $8 billion. Total prior funding had reached $250 million, backed by Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Vitalik Buterin personally.
Polymarket signed MLB as its exclusive official prediction market partner in March 2026 and is in talks to raise at a valuation of approximately $20 billion as it prepares to re-enter the US market under CFTC oversight.
What the money is actually saying
The investors behind all ten are not making speculative bets. These are firms that built their track records on Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Their repeated presence across Web3 venture capital rounds reflects a conviction that decentralized infrastructure is building toward the systemic importance cloud computing holds today.
When Vitalik Buterin personally backs Polymarket and the New York Stock Exchange’s parent drops $2 billion into a blockchain prediction market, something beyond a funding trend is happening. These companies are not being built to flip in a cycle. They are being built to last.
