Lightning Labs, a developer of open, secure, and scalable Lightning systems to enable users to send and receive money more efficiently than ever before, announced today a major milestone, with the successful completion of $10 million Series A funding round. The funding will go toward further developing Lightning payments technology including scaling the developer ecosystem.
“We at Lightning Labs see this as not an accomplishment in and of itself, but a means to achieving our goal of bringing instant bitcoin transactions to millions of people. I’m thankful to the broader bitcoin and Lightning community. We have worked diligently with other protocol developers and implementations such as c-lightning and Eclair to ensure interoperability, and together we’ve moved the Lightning spec process forward.”
– Elizabeth Stark, CEO and Co-Founder of Lightning Labs
Investors
Craft Ventures led the round; Ribbit Capital, M13, and Slow also participated. Angel investors include Ross Stevens (CEO and Founder of Stone Ridge), John Pfeffer (Pfeffer Capital), David B. Heller (former co-head of Securities at Goldman Sachs), Howard Morgan (Founder of First Round Capital), Avichal Garg (Founder of Electric Capital), Proof of Capital, StillMark, CMT Digital, Goldcrest, Abstract, and others.
Loop Release
Further, Lightning Labs also announced a major product release today; the beta of Lightning Loop, the company’s first commercial product. Loop helps startups, node operators, and end-users send and receive on Lightning more efficiently. With Loop, users can move funds between the bitcoin blockchain and the Lightning Network in a non-custodial manner.