Clique – an infrastructure company that is powering secure and data computing for blockchains – announced a successful Series A funding round of $8 million led by Polychain Capital to build a compute coordination network that transforms the way on-chain and off-chain applications access compute and data.
The funding round also included prominent investors such as Bankless, Robot Ventures, Santiago R. Santos, Balaji Srinivasan, and other notable angels, such as the founders of Lido, Polygon, Scroll, Berachain, Monad, Gitcoin, Axiom, Succinct, and Uniswap Foundation.
This latest funding round will be used to power Clique’s goal of enabling efficient and optimal compute resource allocation for applications that have different preferences. By leveraging a diverse range of compute vendors specializing in areas like verifiable compute with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), confidential compute trusted execution environments (TEE), AI-based compute with GPUs, and many others, applications can optimize for various parameters such as cost, trust, privacy, security, and performance.
Launched by Kevin Yu and Jaden Yan, Clique became the first to produce oracles that can handle private data securely and trust-minimized off-chain with technology like ZKPs and TEEs. So far, Clique’s protocol has enabled over $3.5 billion in on-chain transactions.
Clique played a major role in bootstrapping on-chain user data for prominent ecosystems such as Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Mantle, and Ronin. It also served over 750k end users in the Web3 space and established partnerships with over 500 businesses, including industry leaders such as Sony Music US, Trip.com, Aave, Eigenlayer, Sushiswap, Velodrome, Synthetix, and many more.
The Clique Compute Coordination Network organizes off-chain compute resources, allocating them as needed by general applications and smart contracts. And this includes co-processors for performing verifiable computing on top of on-chain data, oracles for bringing in data from any internet data source, and specialized hardware for privacy, secure computation, and AI.
This enables applications to access different compute resources and data easily, with the ability to adjust for preferences around trust, privacy, performance, and cost.
KEY QUOTE:
“Today, there exist many compute providers in both the blockchain and non-blockchain worlds. Each of them has different optimization goals. Trying to integrate those diverse compute supplies to form standardized, schedulable computing services and match them with the appropriate compute demand is a crucial issue to be tackled. What Clique builds exactly enables this interconnection and intercommunication of computing power, potentially empowering a much more vibrant digital economy in the era of AI transformation.”
– Kevin Yu, co-founder of Clique