Bloomberg News reports that Tate Berenbaum is a class apart. Instead of spending time on Zoom or hanging out or, for that matter, trying his hands at baking sourdough, he spent his valuable time coding. The basement had become his coding haven. Right here in the basement, Tate developed the tools for Arweave. A blockchain type of platform, Arweave is known for its feature of permanent data storage. Little did he realize that this would become a turning point in his life.
Being of just 19 years old, Tata Berenbaum has succeeded in raising as much as $30 million for the Community Labs. It is a venture studio and a software startup dedicated to supporting crypto-related projects on the platform Arweave. This 19-year-old has put on hold his first year at the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, he has been building this company, as stated in an interview.
When he enquired about college, Berenbaum revealed that presently, he has no plans of returning to college. Regarding the funding round, the same was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners for the Community Labs. It also comprised Blockchain Capital, Arweave, and Bain Capital Crypto, just to name a few among the other investors involved. Berenbaum did not divulge the valuation of the startup.
Bloomberg News also states that Community Labs, established in the current year, has eight staffers located across the globe, including Leo Lucisano, who is Berenbaum’s 38-year-old co-founder and adviser. Tate Berenbaum also said that his team plans to bring in more versatility when it comes to Arweave.
Bloomberg News reports that Arweave is often the choice as a decentralized data storage platform. For instance, Arweave is being used to archive digital records of the Ukraine war, like videos documenting conflicts and tweets.
However, aside from expanding the data storage capabilities of Arweave, Berenbaum is also looking forward to other aspects of the same, which include allowing the platform to serve similarly to blockchains Solana and Ethereum.
According to Tate Berenbaum, Arweave can be used for financial cases, revealing that the platform already has a service built known by the name Verto, a decentralized exchange used on Arweave for trading tokens. He further said that Community Labs has equally shown interest in making consumer-facing applications on Arweave much better, which includes nonfungible token storage.
Bloomberg News reports that Arweave is positioned well for serving as a “critical piece” related to web3 infrastructure, as per Will Leas, who is associated with Lightspeed as an adviser and a deal partner with Lightspeed Faction, which focuses mainly on the startups that are related to blockchains. He stated that the company decided to support Berenbaum’s startup since the 19-year-old is a so-called “thought leader” in the community of Arweave.
