Microsoft has joined a $450 million funding round for ConsenSys that values the blockchain software engineering firm at $7 billion.
ParaFi Capital led the raise, which was joined by new investors Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Microsoft, Anthos Capital, Sound Ventures, and C Ventures.
ConsenSys has been at the centre of the Web3 revolution, setting itself the task of unlocking the "collaborative power of communities by making DAOs, NFTs, and DeFi universally easy to use, access, and build on".
Its main way of doing this is its MetaMask self-custodial wallet, which lets 30 million monthly active users hold and manage digital tokens, and connect with 3700 Web3 applications - including NFT marketplaces, play-to-earn games, decentralised autonomous organisations, DeFi applications, and metaverse worlds.
The $450 million raise will all be converted to ether to further build ConsenSys’ 'ultra sound money' position.
The funds will be used to hire 600 more employees, support a major MetaMask redesign later in the year, and grow the ConsenSys NFT business.
Joseph Lubin, CEO, ConsenSys, says: "I think of ConsenSys as a broad and deep capabilities machine for the decentralized protocols ecosystem, able to rapidly capitalize at scale on fundamental new constructs that emerge, such as developer tooling, wallets, security audits, DeFi, NFTs, Layer-2 scaling, DAOs, and more."