Solana Optimistic Network raises funds in a 'cobuilder' round without participation from VC firms

Solana Optimistic Network — known as SOON — has raised an undisclosed amount in what is being called a "cobuilder " round.

Participating are Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Coinbasae Ventures Principal Jonathan King, Celestia Labs cofounder Mustafa Al-Bassam, Avail cofounder Robinson Burkey, Wormhole Foundation cofounder Robinson Burkey, and others.

According to a press release, the round is exclusively for builders — hence the name — and claims to have had no involvement from venture capital firms.

According to the release, the funds raised will be used to make SOON "the highest throughput rollup stack, offering scalability and efficiency for decentralized applications and any Layer 1 blockchain " by building the flagships SOON Stack and SOON Mainnet.

SOON Stack is a modular framework combining SVM and OP Stack. SOON Mainnet is a general-purpose SVM Layer 2 that settles on Ethereum.

“Our vision with SOON is to combine the power engine of Solana, SVM with liquidity and user base from other L1s, and to make SVM the standard for every L1 ecosystem — so every developer who has been constrained by the execution environment can bring the best UX to users," SOON CEO and cofounder Joanna Zeng said.

"With SOON, we aim to be the most efficient rollup while reducing costs and raising performance by 100X in every ecosystem, relative to the highest performing EVM, complimented by a culture friendly towards non-Solana blue chips,” Zeng added.