Mert Mumtaz is a Canadian entrepreneur and angel investor best known as the co-founder and CEO of Helius, a Solana developer infrastructure company. His investing activity sits squarely inside the Solana ecosystem, where he has backed roughly a dozen early-stage projects since 2022. He is one of the most vocal public advocates for Solana, particularly during the turbulent period following the FTX collapse in late 2022, when he continued to ship and invest while broader sentiment turned negative.
Mumtaz launched Helius in 2022 to address a concrete gap: Solana developers had no reliable, high-performance RPC access with built-in developer tooling. Helius grew quickly into one of the primary infrastructure layers for the Solana ecosystem, serving thousands of developers and applications. The company raised a seed round and later a Series A, though exact figures have not been fully disclosed publicly. His operational background at Helius shapes his investing lens: he tends to back infrastructure, developer tooling, and consumer applications built on Solana.
Notable investments
Public information about Mumtaz's full angel portfolio is limited. He has disclosed investments in or publicly supported several Solana-native projects across DeFi, NFT infrastructure, and developer tooling, but specific deal terms and the full list of 13 portfolio companies have not been systematically published. He is active on X (@0xMert_), where he occasionally announces or signals support for projects he has backed. Investors and founders in the Solana space frequently cite him as an early check writer who brings operational credibility alongside capital.
- Helius – co-founded; Solana RPC and developer platform, his primary operating venture
- Several undisclosed Solana-ecosystem seed-stage investments (DeFi protocols, tooling, consumer apps)
Public information about the specific names, check sizes, and entry valuations of his angel deals is limited as of early 2026.
Team
Mumtaz operates as a solo angel investor alongside his CEO role at Helius. There is no formal fund structure or named managing partners attached to his personal angel activity. At Helius, he works with a co-founding team focused on engineering and go-to-market, though individual team members have maintained lower public profiles than Mumtaz himself.
Recent activity
Through 2024 and into 2025, Mumtaz remained deeply embedded in the Solana ecosystem as it recovered and expanded. Helius scaled its product surface to include webhooks, enhanced transaction parsing, and priority fee tooling – reflecting the broader maturation of Solana's developer market. On the investing side, he has continued to write early checks into Solana-native teams, with a stated preference for builders who ship fast and focus on genuine user demand rather than speculative token design.
He has been outspoken about the importance of infrastructure quality as a prerequisite for consumer adoption in crypto, a thesis that aligns with both his operating work at Helius and his angel portfolio. His geographic base in Canada has not constrained his deal flow, which remains global but Solana-centric.
For founders building on Solana, Mumtaz represents a credible early backer with direct infrastructure expertise. His track record is still maturing – Helius itself is his most significant venture, and the full returns on his angel portfolio will depend on Solana's continued ecosystem growth. Public data on his AUM, fund formation, or LP relationships does not exist, as he invests from personal capital rather than a registered vehicle.
