Neon Labs, a startup bringing Ethereum virtual machine functionality to the Solana blockchain, today announced it has raised $40 million in new funding in a private token sale.

The round was led by Jump Capital, with additional investments from Solana Capital, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Three Arrows Capital, Ethereal Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures and others.

This funding comes at a time that Neon Labs is preparing for the launch of its Neon Ethereum virtual machine 1.0 smart contracts on the Solana blockchain mainnet. Once launched, it will permit developers to migrate Ethereum distributed apps, or dapps, onto Solana without the need to change any code.

The EVM is currently live on the Solana testnet and devnet where it has been undergoing testing and security auditing. It has also given developers a chance to prepare multichain deployments of their dapps using Neon Lab’s EVM solution.

“The successful completion of our round is proof that the community believes in our cross-chain solution,” said Marina Guryeva, chief executive of Neon Labs. “When we are talking about Ethereum dapps coming to Solana via Neon EVM, it’s more than just deployment of their contracts. Sushi, Aave and several more dapps have confirmed their interest in deploying on Neon EVM.”

Ethereum is the largest blockchain ecosystem for dapp development, but it suffers from scalability issues, with huge fees and performance gaps. Using the Neon EVM, developers get cross-chain development capability that will enable them to write once and run on either blockchain, allowing them to reach both markets and take advantage of Solana’s lower fees, higher performance and an emerging market.

“From an engineer’s perspective, write code once, run everywhere has been a holy grail for a long time as evidenced by Java’s Virtual Machine success,” said Saurabh Sharma, a partner at Jump Capital. “In a multichain world, Neon has the potential to be a core infrastructure block that opens up so many scaling possibilities for developers.”

The Solana blockchain recently suffered a day-long outage caused by a denial-of-service attack in September. In spite of that, the blockchain continues to be one of the fastest-growing blockchain ecosystems and its token, SOL, has risen to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Other projects seeking to bring Ethereum compatibility to other blockchains have also been receiving funding as well. For example, Aurora Labs raised $12 million in October for EVM functionality on the Near blockchain.

Neon Labs said it intends to use the new funding to scale up the team and expand research, core development, marketing and business development. In addition, the company aims to spur development and innovation within the Neon ecosystem with incentive programs.

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