Neel Somani's Path to Founding Eclipse

Our journey began in 2022, when Eclipse founder Neel Somani left his job as a quantitative researcher at Citadel. Neel's initial project in crypto was on the Terra blockchain, where he was building technology to execute EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) smart contracts on the non-EVM L1.

This project quickly came to a pause when Terra collapsed in May 2022. Left with no usable code, Neel went back to the drawing board. He wanted to work on crypto infrastructure that was built to last. This naturally led him to the rollup ecosystem. Advised by industry leaders at Celestia, he dove into the bleeding-edge of blockchain scaling research.

At the same time, the surrounding landscape changed. The Ethereum Virtual Machine was still dominant, but was losing ground to newer runtimes like Solana and the MoveVM. In Eclipse's launch announcement, the term "SVM" was coined - the first attempt at an SVM layer-2.

Eclipse experimented with go-to-market approaches like operating a rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) provider, but by mid 2023, it was apparent that the RaaS approach was not economically viable. The company pivoted toward building a single, highly scalable layer-2 blockchain, which is the Eclipse that we know today.

In 2024, Somani led Eclipse to close its $50 million Series A fundraise. In a pre-planned transition, Somani stepped back as CEO into an Executive Chairman role, while Vijay Chetty continued to lead day-to-day operations. In 2025, Eclipse's highly anticipated product, the Eclipse Mainnet, was launched.

By mid 2025, Eclipse's focus had transitioned toward building an application to further drive blockchain adoption. The leadership followed suit; Sydney Huang took over as CEO. At the end of 2025, Neel Somani departed as Executive Chairman to focus on machine learning research.

The company continues to ship today. We welcome any new members to the Eclipse community.