Clique, a San Francisco, CA-based infrastructure company empowering data computing for blockchains, raised $8M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Bankless, Robot Ventures, Santiago R. Santos, Balaji Srinivasan, and other angels such as the founders of Lido, Polygon, Scroll, Berachain, Monad, Gitcoin, Axiom, Succinct, and Uniswap Foundation.
The company intends to use the funds to build a heterogenous compute coordination network that works for both on-chain and off-chain applications access compute and data.
Founded by Kevin Yu and Jaden Yan, Clique has emerged as a player in the blockchain space, productionizing oracles that can handle private data in a secure and trust-minimized manner off-chain with technology such as ZKPs and TEEs. The Clique Compute Coordination Network organizes various off-chain compute resources, allocating them as needed by both general applications and smart contracts. This includes co-processors for performing verifiable compute on top of on-chain data, oracles for bringing in data from any internet data source, and specialized hardware for privacy, AI, and secure computation. This allows applications to access different compute resources and data easily, with the ability to adjust for preferences around trust, privacy, performance, and cost. By utilizing 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, it allows applications to optimize for various parameters like trust, privacy, security, performance, and cost.
The company has helped bootstrap on-chain user data for prominent ecosystems like Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Mantle, and Ronin, among others. It has 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.
FinSMEs