Movement Labs, a San Francisco-based blockchain developer, has secured $38 million in a Series A funding round, with Polychain Capital leading the investment. This substantial funding infusion is expected to fuel the company's mission of integrating Facebook's Move Virtual Machine into Ethereum (ETH), aimed at enhancing smart contract security and transaction efficiency.

The funding round attracted participation from prominent venture capital firms including Hack VC, Placeholder, Figment Capital, Bankless Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Aptos Labs, among others. Movement Labs aims to address vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem, which saw losses exceeding $5.4 billion between 2022 and 2023 due to smart contract exploits.

The startup's Move-EVM product is specifically engineered to mitigate such attacks by enabling developers to deploy code that undergoes real-time verification, thereby thwarting attack vectors like reentrancy. Move, originally developed by Facebook for its Diem blockchain crypto payment project, provides a secure framework for writing smart contracts utilized in cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized applications (dApps).

Movement Labs has experienced a significant trajectory of growth, building on its success since securing a $3.4 million pre-seed round in September 2023. Notable contributors to the pre-seed funding included Varys Capital, the Avalanche Fund by Blizzard, dao5, Borderless Capital, and various stakeholders within the Wormhole developer ecosystem. Angel investors such as Chandler Song, Ryan Fang, Stanley Wu from Ankr, George Lampeth from dao5, and Calvin Liu from Eigenlayer also participated in the pre-seed round.

The funds from the pre-seed round were directed towards introducing the Movement SDK, a tool designed to simplify the creation of secure and high-performing Move environments for established blockchains. Furthermore, Movement Labs forged a strategic partnership earlier this year with Covalent (CQT), a multichain indexer with integration across 225 chains. This collaboration aims to integrate real-time data indexing and deployment tools, including Covalent's Unified API and GoldRush Kit, into the Movement ecosystem. The Unified API offers seamless access to real-time and historical blockchain data, while the GoldRush Kit enhances user experience by providing a user-friendly interface for accessing and visualizing historical blockchain data within the Movement Labs ecosystem.