Sort Raises $3.5 Million for Product Development

Sort, a developer platform that facilitates the incorporation of smart contracts into Web3 applications, raised $3.5 million in a preliminary funding round co-led by venture capital (VC) firm Lemniscap and The General Partnership.

The startup intends to use the proceeds from the financing to expand its product line. “The funding will be used to expand the Sort team, advance the platform’s product suite, and accelerate the launch of Sort applications, the full-stack for writing a blockchain contract’s user interface.” based on a press release.

Despite a severe crypto winter, Web3 application developers remained resilient and continued to contribute to the ecosystem. In the first quarter of this year, developers installed an average of 1.9 million Ethereum software development kits (SDK) per week, representing a 47% year-over-year increase, according to the most recent study conducted by Web3 developer back-end company Alchemy. Moreover, since the first quarter of 2022, 788% more wallet SDKs have been deployed, a record high for wallet infrastructure installation.

Sort has over 150 free users and a limited number of paying customers before its official launch. For example, the Chillennials NFT initiative’s leaderboard is powered by Sort.

“Sort makes it simple to create websites/front-ends for blockchain applications,” co-founder Jason Zucchetto wrote in an email.

According to Zucchetto, Sort will provide developers with a complete developer toolkit and access to a contract address, and he added that the platform includes a component to assist React developers in creating web applications.
React is an open-source JavaScript library used by developers to build JavaScript-based applications.

“Once the contract is paid for on Sort (and it is sponsored), it is available for anyone to use for free,” Zucchetto said.

“The developer of the contract gets two large benefits: Sort is the backend (no need to manage any infrastructure/servers) and they can go to their community/discord/twitter and say build applications on Sort for free when using contract,” he noted.

Alliance DAO, Punk DAO, Orange DAO, Blizzard Fund, Parasol, Red Rooster Ventures, and many entrepreneurs from Coinbase, Gemini, and Snyk participated in the seed funding round.