Binance's VC arm tops up Aptos investment ahead of launch

Binance's VC arm has chosen to top up its investment in Aptos, the company founded by ex-Meta employees. 

Binance Labs said it was backing the blockchain startup partly due to its use of Move, the programming language the company is using to build its product, Binance Labs wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

Aptos said it will use the funds raised to expand its team and "support the development of its innovative layer-1 infrastructure."

The funding adds to an $150 million round announced in July, led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto. It also follows a funding round in March, which saw the blockchain developer raise $200 million from investors such as a16z, Tiger Global and Multicoin Capital. 

The startup was originally founded by former Meta employees hoping to bring blockchain technology to a wider audience of “billions” of people. At present, Aptos operates on a series of testnets and its mainnet has yet to launch, although it is slated for later this year.  

Binance did not disclose the value of the raise. Bloomberg earlier reported that Binance's co-founder Yi He said the market value of Aptos is now estimated to be more than $4 billion. A spokesperson for Binance contacted The Block to say the $4 billion valuation is inaccurate, while declining to specify the true figure.

"At Binance, we’ve always believed in the power of blockchain technology to benefit the masses, just like the Internet," said in a press statement. "However, infrastructure building remains a bottleneck within the industry. We believe that the technological competitiveness of the Aptos team could bring increased scalability to the blockchain infrastructure while also supporting novel use cases for Web3."

This article was updated to clarify earlier reporting on Aptos' valuation.