KRNL Labs Raises £1.3M to Build the Open Infrastructure for Cross-Chain Web3 Apps

KRNL Labs, a UK Web3 infrastructure company, has raised £1.3 million from Blockchain Founders Fund (BFF), Builder Capital, Ryze Labs, and WAGMI Ventures to develop its open software library for cross-chain decentralised application development. The company is building developer infrastructure that enables teams building Web3 applications to create products that can interact with multiple blockchain networks simultaneously, rather than being constrained to the capabilities, liquidity, and user base of any single chain.

The blockchain ecosystem has evolved from a single-chain world — defined initially by Bitcoin and then by Ethereum — into a highly fragmented multi-chain landscape. Dozens of Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks have emerged, each with different trade-offs in speed, cost, security, and programmability. Ethereum remains the dominant smart contract platform by total value locked, but alternative networks including Solana, Avalanche, Sui, Aptos, and various Ethereum rollups have developed substantial user bases and liquidity in specific application categories. The result is that users and assets are distributed across many chains, and developers building applications that want to serve the broadest possible audience face a difficult choice: pick one chain and accept its limitations, or build the complex cross-chain infrastructure needed to operate across many.

Cross-chain development is technically demanding. Reading state from multiple chains, executing transactions across chain boundaries, managing the asynchrony and latency of cross-chain communication, and handling the security complexities of bridges and interoperability protocols all require specialised engineering that is currently reinvented from scratch by each team that attempts it. KRNL Labs provides an open software library that abstracts these complexities, giving developers tools to build cross-chain applications without needing deep expertise in each underlying protocol. The library handles the low-level communication, authentication, and execution logic across supported chains, exposing a cleaner API surface to application developers.

The investor base — combining specialist Web3 funds including Ryze Labs and WAGMI Ventures with the broader portfolio approach of Blockchain Founders Fund — gives KRNL access to the developer communities and protocol relationships that accelerate adoption of infrastructure tools. The funding will be used to expand chain coverage, grow the developer community, and develop the tooling needed to make cross-chain development as accessible as single-chain development.

Sources

• KRNL Labs — company website