Helius powers Solana's explosive growth with vertical integration

What Helius does

Helius Blockchain Technologies has rapidly emerged as the backbone of Solana's developer ecosystem, processing over 8 billion daily RPC requests with 99.9999% uptime while serving major enterprises including Coinbase and Shopify. Helius also operates the largest validator on Solana, securing over 2.5B USD of value. Founded in 2022 by former Coinbase and AWS engineers during crypto's darkest winter, the company has raised $34.35 million and now powers more than 90% of teams with their RPC, transaction sending, webhook, enhanced APIs and compression services on Solana.

The Current Landscape

The blockchain infrastructure space faces a critical challenge: most providers build horizontally across multiple chains, spreading resources thin and delivering suboptimal performance. Competitors like QuickNode, Alchemy, and Infura charge complex pricing models while supporting dozens of different blockchains. This horizontal approach often results in poorly built applications and underperforming chains, as providers lack the deep technical expertise required for any single ecosystem. The industry has prioritized breadth over depth, creating significant friction for developers who spend more time wrestling with infrastructure complexity than building innovative applications.

Helius Birth Story

The founding story of Helius began with firsthand frustration during crypto's darkest period in 2022. CEO Mert Mumtaz, while building infrastructure at Coinbase, discovered that supporting multiple blockchains created significant friction as each chain required unique technical architecture and cultural understanding. Together with Liam Vovk (CTO) and Nicolas Pennie (COO), they recognized that despite Solana's superior performance characteristics—offering lower latency and transaction costs than competitors—developers were spending more time wrestling with infrastructure complexity than building applications.

The team made a contrarian bet during the crypto winter: while competitors spread resources across dozens of blockchains, Helius would focus exclusively on Solana and build the deepest vertical integration in the industry. This philosophy drove them to eliminate Solana's complexities while improving the entire network from the bottom up, positioning the company for explosive growth as the market recovered.

The Helius Solution

Under CTO Liam Vovk's technical leadership, Helius has distinguished itself through a unique architectural approach that prioritizes depth over breadth. The company's deep product suite and focus on Solana means that they always have the latest features and highest performance. Additionally, the company's transparent pricing model contrasts sharply with competitors' complex fee structures. Helius operates the largest validator on Solana by stake with 0% commission fees, enabling stake-weighted quality of service that provides customers with prioritized transaction routing.

Recent innovations include ZK compression technology that dramatically reduces on-chain storage costs and the Digital Asset Standard API that significantly cuts infrastructure costs. The infrastructure spans eleven global data centers from Frankfurt to Tokyo, maintaining SOC 2 Type 1 compliance for enterprise security requirements. Helius's suite includes high-performance RPC nodes, advanced transaction sending services, comprehensive APIs for NFTs and tokens, real-time webhooks, and ultra-low latency gRPC streaming that receives data directly from Solana leaders as blocks are produced.

The company has raised $34.35 million in total funding, including a $21.75 million Series B in September 2024 co-led by Haun Ventures and Founders Fund, following a $9.5 million Series A led by Foundation Capital. The investor roster includes Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, along with prominent angels like Balaji Srinivasan and Kyle Samani.

A Customer Story

Helius's infrastructure excellence became evident during some of blockchain's most demanding events. During the Jupiter airdrop and Trump token launch—some of the largest token distributions in crypto history—Helius's systems enabled seamless processing of millions of simultaneous transactions without performance degradation. The company successfully supported the Helium network's migration to Solana, processing nearly one million NFT mints while reducing costs by over 1000%.

Enterprise clients regularly process millions transactions in single days during peak congestion periods, with Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante stating that "Helius powers a great portion of our infrastructure," while Crossmint's leadership notes that "a big percentage of Crossmint products couldn't exist without Helius." These success stories demonstrate how Helius's deep Solana expertise enables applications to scale during critical moments when competitors typically fail.

The Team Culture

The distributed team of 30 employees across seven major cities maintains a developer-first culture that reflects crypto's 24/7 nature. "Internet capital markets are global and online 24/7. So is our team," the company states, offering flexible schedules, wellness budgets, and continuous learning support. This approach has attracted top talent from AWS, Stripe, and Digital Ocean, creating what industry observers call "some of the foremost thought leaders and technical developers within the entire blockchain ecosystem."

Leadership includes CTO Liam Vovk and COO Nicolas Pennie, who previously engineered large-scale systems at Amazon, CEO Mert Mumtaz with deep blockchain infrastructure experience from Coinbase, and CRO Deepa Talwar who helped scale Stripe and Uber’s business operations. The team's combined expertise in distributed systems, blockchain architecture, and enterprise infrastructure has enabled Helius to achieve technical milestones that competitors struggle to match.

“Helius was built with a simple but ambitious vision—create the fastest, most reliable blockchain infrastructure in the world, and make it so seamless that developers forget it’s even there. When infrastructure works flawlessly, it disappears, and that’s when real innovation happens. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to every day.” - Liam Vovk, CTO and Co-founder

Find out more about Helius:

https://www.helius.dev/