Pharos Raises $8 Million Seed Round
Pharos, a fast-rising player in blockchain infrastructure, has landed $8 million in seed funding, co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC, with additional support from key players like SNZ Capital, Reforge, and Chorus One Ventures.
This funding injects serious momentum into Pharos’ mission to bridge decentralized finance (DeFi) and real-world assets, promising a new level of scalability in the blockchain space.
The company has ambitious plans to use the fresh capital to develop the Pharos protocol further and expand its ecosystem and community—one eager to tackle blockchain’s biggest challenge yet: mass adoption.
For Pharos, which focuses on “hyper-parallelism” across key operations like consensus, execution, and storage, scalability isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a call to action. As CEO Alex Zhang puts it, “This is just the beginning of an exciting journey.
At Pharos, we are driven by our belief to bridge existing FinTech services with trustless Web3 innovations to onboard billions of new users and real-world assets into the Web3 ecosystem.” Zhang’s enthusiasm underscores Pharos' grand vision: to connect traditional financial services with Web3's groundbreaking capabilities, setting the stage for a blockchain infrastructure capable of supporting real-time, decentralized payment networks on a global scale.
The funding news comes alongside Pharos’ announcement of a partnership with ZAN, the Web3 brand of Ant Digital Technologies. Through this collaboration, Pharos and ZAN aim to tackle Web3 infrastructure, focusing on node services, security enhancements, and hardware acceleration.
This strategic partnership could be a major boost for Pharos, solidifying the network’s architecture to meet security and performance demands as its reach grows.
Lightspeed Faction, known for its strategic investments in early-stage blockchain projects, is all-in on Pharos' potential. Clara Boh, Deal Partner at Faction, expressed confidence in Pharos’ approach, saying:
“Pharos' unique approach to parallelism and high-performance architecture positions it as a game-changer for bringing real-world assets and decentralized finance together.”
Boh’s statement speaks to the broader excitement surrounding Pharos’ commitment to efficient blockchain technology that directly connects to practical, everyday uses.
Hack VC’s Managing Partner, Alex Pack, was similarly optimistic. With Hack VC’s history of supporting Web3 innovators, Pack sees Pharos as uniquely positioned to meet the scale and performance required for blockchain’s mainstream adoption.
“For blockchains to go mainstream and get true mass adoption, they must become orders-of-magnitude more scalable and performant,” he stated. “The Pharos team has been working on this problem for years, at the highest level, and we’re excited to support them now in solving these problems with the Pharos protocol.”
While blockchain promises to unlock new forms of decentralized payments, interoperability with existing financial technologies remains a critical challenge.
Pharos is charting a unique path by prioritizing FinTech compatibility and real-world applications from the get-go. With a powerful network of investors and industry alliances, Pharos is positioning itself as a promising bridge between the Web2 and Web3 worlds.
It’s clear Pharos is gearing up for big things, and with this seed funding round, its roadmap just became a little clearer.
With the heavyweights of blockchain investing behind it, Pharos could well be on its way to bringing blockchain’s full promise to life.
The journey, as Zhang said, is only beginning—but it looks like Pharos has already hit the ground running.
