Anurag Arjun is a blockchain entrepreneur and angel investor best known as one of the four co-founders of Polygon (originally Matic Network), launched in 2017. Polygon grew into one of the most widely used Ethereum scaling platforms, processing billions of transactions and attracting deployments from Aave, OpenSea, Meta, and Starbucks. In 2022 the project raised $450 million at a $13 billion valuation, cementing Polygon as a flagship success story of the Layer 2 era. Arjun's background is in product and business development, and he played a central role in Polygon's early ecosystem partnerships and go-to-market strategy.
In 2023, Arjun stepped back from Polygon to co-found Avail alongside Prabal Banerjee. Avail is a modular blockchain layer focused on data availability – one of the more technically demanding infrastructure problems in the rollup ecosystem. The project raised a seed round in 2023 and followed with a $75 million Series A in 2024 led by Founders Fund, with participation from Dragonfly Capital and other institutional backers. Arjun serves as CEO of Avail. His shift from a multi-billion-dollar scaling network toward a deep infrastructure bet reflects a consistent interest in foundational blockchain primitives rather than consumer applications.
In parallel with his operating roles, Arjun has been active as an angel investor, with a publicly tracked portfolio of approximately five projects. Public information about the specific names and deal terms of his angel investments is limited – he does not maintain a public investment page and rarely discloses individual checks. His bets are generally assumed to sit in the Web3 infrastructure and developer tooling space, consistent with his technical background. Geographic focus appears global, with particular attention to projects building in the Ethereum and modular blockchain ecosystems.
Notable investments and associations
- Polygon (Matic Network) – Co-founder; one of the top Ethereum scaling solutions by transaction volume. MATIC reached a peak market cap above $20 billion in 2021.
- Avail – Co-founder and CEO; modular data availability layer backed by Founders Fund and Dragonfly Capital. Series A covered by The Block.
- Additional angel positions: Public information about specific portfolio companies beyond Avail is limited.
Team and background
Arjun co-founded Polygon with Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, and Mihailo Bjelic. All four came from Indian engineering and fintech backgrounds. Arjun held a product leadership role at Polygon before transitioning to Avail. At Avail, his co-founder Prabal Banerjee leads technical direction as CTO, having previously worked on Polygon's research and protocol teams. The Avail team is distributed, with roots in India and the broader Ethereum developer community.
Recent activity
Between 2024 and early 2026, Arjun has focused primarily on scaling Avail's adoption among rollup developers and validiums. Avail's data availability layer competes with Celestia and EigenDA for rollup clients. The $75 million raise in 2024 gave the project a strong runway. Arjun has been a vocal advocate for the modular blockchain thesis – the idea that execution, settlement, and data availability should be separated into specialized layers – and speaks regularly at Ethereum-adjacent conferences on this topic. His angel activity during this period has been quieter, with no major publicly announced deals.
Arjun's most significant win remains Polygon: an early-stage bet on Ethereum scaling that returned extraordinary value to its co-founders and investors. His pivot to Avail suggests he is trying to replicate that trajectory at the infrastructure layer, at a time when data availability has become one of the most contested technical markets in crypto. Whether Avail can establish the same category dominance that Polygon held in 2020–2022 is the central open question for his next chapter as both a builder and a backer.
