Sort, a platform for developers that facilitates building smart contracts into Web3 apps, raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round co-led by venture capital (VC) firm Lemniscap and The General Partnership.

The startup is looking to use the proceeds from the funding towards expanding its product offerings. “The funding will go towards expanding the Sort team, advancing the platform’s product suite, and expediting the launch of ‘Sort applications’, the full-stack for writing a UI for a blockchain contract.” according to a press release.

Despite a harsh crypto winter, Web3 applications developers remained resilient and continued to build in the ecosystem. Most recent study done by Web3 developer back end company Alchemy showed that during the first quarter of this year, developers installed an average of 1.9 million Ethereum software development kits (SDK) per week, a 47% increase year over year. Meanwhile, 788% more wallet SDKs were deployed since the first quarter of 2022, an all-time high for installing wallet infrastructure.

Sort currently has over 150 free users and a small handful of paying customers ahead of their official launch. The Chillennials NFT project, for example, uses Sort to power their leaderboard. “Sort makes it simple to create websites/front-ends for blockchain applications,” said co-founder Jason Zucchetto via email.

Developers would start with a contract address and will get access to a complete developer toolkit from Sort, Zucchetto said, noting that it also has a component on the platform to help React developers to start building web applications.

React is an open-source JavaScript library and developers use it to design and create JavaScript-based apps.

“Once the contract is paid for on Sort (and it is sponsored), it is available for anyone to use for free,” Zucchetto said.

“The developer of the contract gets two large benefits: Sort is the backend (no need to manage any infrastructure/servers) and they can go to their community/discord/twitter and say build applications on Sort for free when using contract,” he noted.

The seed funding round also included participation from Alliance DAO, Punk DAO, Orange DAO, Blizzard Fund, Parasol, Red Rooster Ventures, and a number of angels from Coinbase, Gemini, and Snyk.

Read more: How to Become a Web3 Developer