Aptos Labs is a blockchain infrastructure company incorporated in the United States, best known as the developer of the Aptos Layer-1 blockchain. The company was founded in 2021 by former Meta engineers who had worked on the Diem (originally Libra) distributed payments project. After Meta shelved Diem in early 2022, the core team regrouped and raised outside capital to build a new high-performance blockchain using the Move programming language – the same language developed internally at Meta. Aptos mainnet launched in October 2022.
Beyond building its own network, Aptos Labs operates as a strategic investor in early-stage projects that build on or around the Aptos ecosystem. Its investment thesis centers on expanding the Aptos developer community, growing decentralized finance primitives on the network, and funding infrastructure that drives transaction volume. The company is headquartered in the United States; the exact city is listed variously as Palo Alto and New York in public filings. A separate entity, the Aptos Foundation, handles grant programs and community development alongside the Labs investment activity.
Aptos Labs raised approximately $200 million in a Series A round in March 2022 led by a16z crypto, with participation from FTX Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Tiger Global, and others, reaching a reported valuation of $2.75 billion. An earlier seed round of roughly $150 million closed around the same period. Total disclosed fundraising stands above $350 million. The company has not publicly disclosed the size of its own investment fund or AUM dedicated to third-party portfolio companies.
Notable investments
Aptos Labs and the Aptos Foundation have backed a range of ecosystem projects, primarily at the seed and pre-seed stages. Publicly referenced portfolio companies include DeFi protocols and infrastructure builders native to the Aptos network. However, the company does not maintain a public portfolio page with deal-by-deal disclosures, and individual round sizes are rarely confirmed. Public information about specific investment amounts and lead/follow roles across all 13 reported portfolio positions is limited. Projects commonly cited in ecosystem coverage include:
- Thala Labs – DeFi protocol on Aptos offering stablecoin issuance and DEX liquidity
- Echelon Market – lending and borrowing protocol built natively on Aptos
- Pontem Network – Move language tooling and wallet infrastructure
- Merkle Trade – perpetuals trading platform on Aptos
Independent verification of all 13 reported portfolio positions is not possible from public sources alone.
Team
The company was co-founded by Mo Shaikh (CEO) and Avery Ching (CTO). Both held senior engineering and product roles at Meta, where they worked directly on the Diem blockchain. Shaikh previously held strategy and business development roles at BlackRock and Consensys before joining Meta. Ching is a distributed systems engineer who led infrastructure work on Diem's consensus layer. The founding team drew heavily from Meta's broader Novi financial infrastructure group. Leadership of the Aptos Foundation's grant and investment arms is handled by separate personnel; specific names have not been consistently disclosed in press coverage.
Recent activity
In 2024 and into 2025, Aptos Labs focused on growing its developer ecosystem through a combination of direct investments, hackathon grants, and partnerships with established financial institutions. The company announced a collaboration with Microsoft to explore AI and blockchain integrations and signed a deal with South Korea's Kookmin Bank for blockchain-based financial services pilots. Aptos also expanded into gaming and consumer applications, backing studios targeting the Southeast Asian market. The network crossed 1 billion total transactions in 2024, which the team cited as a benchmark for adoption. The Aptos Foundation continued its grant program, distributing funds to Move developers and academic research groups.
Aptos sits in a competitive segment alongside Sui – another Move-based blockchain with overlapping founding DNA from Meta's Diem team. Both networks compete for the same developer pool and DeFi liquidity. Aptos's investment activity remains tightly coupled to its network growth strategy: the portfolio is largely a bet on its own ecosystem rather than a diversified cross-chain venture fund. Whether the network achieves meaningful decentralized application adoption beyond its current DeFi core will shape the relevance of its portfolio in the medium term. More detail on individual deals can be found on Crunchbase.
