Community Labs' Teenage Founder Tate Berenbaum Raises $30 Million for Crypto Startup

Instead of baking sourdough or hanging out on Zoom during the depths of the pandemic, Tate Berenbaum spent most of the time coding in his basement. There, the high schooler built developer tools for Arweave, a blockchain-like platform known for permanent data storage. At the time, he didn’t realize the results would be life-changing.

Now 19 years old, Berenbaum has raised $30 million for Community Labs, a software startup and venture studio dedicated to supporting crypto projects on Arweave. Berenbaum said in an interview that he moved to New York and has put his first year at the University of Virginia on hold as he builds out the company.

Asked about college, Berenbaum said, “At the moment, I don’t have plans to go back.”

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the funding round for Community Labs, which also included Arweave, Bain Capital Crypto and Blockchain Capital, among other investors. Berenbaum declined to disclose the startup’s valuation.

Founded this year, Community Labs currently has eight staffers located around the world, including Berenbaum’s 38-year-old adviser and co-founder, Leo Lucisano. Berenbaum said the team is dedicated to bringing more versatility to Arweave.

Arweave is often the platform of choice for decentralized data storage. For example, Arweave is being used to archive digital records of the war in Ukraine, such as tweets and videos documenting the conflict.

But in addition to expanding upon Arweave's data storage capabilities, Berenbaum is looking at other purposes for Arweave that would allow it to function more similarly to blockchains like Ethereum and Solana.

“It can be used for financial use cases,” Berenbaum said, noting that he has already built a service called Verto, a decentralized exchange for trading tokens, on Arweave. He said Community Labs is also interested in improving consumer-facing applications for Arweave, such as nonfungible token storage.

Arweave is well-positioned to be a “critical piece” of web3 infrastructure, according to Will Leas, an adviser at Lightspeed and deal partner at Lightspeed Faction, which is focused on blockchain-related startups. He said that the firm chose to back Berenbaum’s startup in part because the teenager is a “thought leader” in the Arweave community.

Samuel Harrison, senior adviser at Lightspeed and founder and managing partner of Lightspeed Faction, said in an interview that his team is still interested in backing projects like Community Labs despite the onset of the crypto winter.

“We really don’t try to ramp up or round down our investment activity based on the cycle,” Harrison said.