CoinFund Leads $10M Series A for Irys to Build the “AWS for On-Chain Data”

Irys, a pioneering layer-1 datachain platform, has secured $10 million in a Series A funding round. The investment was led by the crypto-native venture firm CoinFund, with significant participation from Amber Group, Hypersphere, Tykhe Ventures, and several other strategic investors. This latest capital infusion brings Irys’s total funding to $20 million as it positions itself to redefine value creation within the estimated $3 trillion data economy.

The core mission of Irys is to address a fundamental flaw in today’s digital landscape: while data is an immensely valuable asset, its creators rarely capture its worth. The platform is building a unified blockchain infrastructure that combines a dedicated data layer with a native smart contract execution layer, all compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This architecture allows users to embed programmable instructions—such as licensing terms, monetization rules, and access controls—directly into the data itself.

Josh Benaron, CEO and founder of Irys, framed the problem succinctly: “The data economy has a massive infrastructure problem. AI companies scrape trillions of dollars worth of content while creators see nothing. Enterprises sit on valuable datasets they can’t monetize. We’re building the infrastructure that finally allows data creators to capture the value they generate.”

Since launching its testnet in January 2025, Irys has demonstrated remarkable traction, processing over 600 million data transactions and attracting more than 4 million active wallets. The platform has also forged partnerships with more than 80 strategic organizations.

The fresh capital will be used to aggressively scale Irys’s infrastructure, grow its team, and expand its partnership network. The goal is to accelerate institutional adoption of its programmable datachain ahead of its mainnet launch.

Einar Braathen, a Partner at CoinFund, drew a powerful analogy to illustrate Irys’s potential, stating, “Where traditional approaches require piecing together multiple solutions, Irys has created unified infrastructure that makes data programmable. This is the AWS moment for onchain data.” This comparison highlights the potential for Irys to become the foundational, indispensable infrastructure layer for the next generation of the AI and data economy, much like Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing.