Venture capital firms Gate Ventures and Boon Ventures announced a partnership with Movement Labs for a new $20 million fund dedicated to Web3 startups.

According to an Oct. 13 announcement, the fund targets the development of Move-based protocols, especially projects bridging the Move network with Ethereum-compatible (EVM) applications.

“The fund will invest across a range of Web3 verticals within the Move ecosystem,” a spokesperson for Gate Ventures, the investment arm of crypto exchange Gate.io, told Cointelegraph.

Investments will go toward decentralized finance (DeFi) projects working on security, GameFi with in-game asset transactions and non-fungible token (NFT) management, as well as interoperability solutions for data and asset transfers between Move and EVM ecosystems.

Startups backed by the initiative will also participate in a mentorship program and hackathons, along with the opportunity to join a research grant program for blockchain interoperability.

Related: Movement Labs joins Agglayer, bags $160M TVL commitment for mainnet

Movement Labs is a protocol developed on the Move programming language, originally created by Facebook-parent Meta. Different from the Aptos Network, a layer-1 that also uses the Move programming language, Movement Labs’s upcoming mainnet will offer a layer-2 solution for integrating Move and Ethereum transactions.

The startup recently raised $38 million in a Series A funding round, led by Polychain Capital, to advance fast-finality rollups, cross-chain atomic transactions, and customizable transaction sequencing.

Therefore, supporting startups working on both Move and the EVM ecosystem is crucial for improving liquidity and adoption among developers.

“The ultimate goal is to create an integrated blockchain environment where developers can build across platforms without sacrificing security or performance,” noted a spokesperson for Movement Labs.

Movement has been investing in startups to spur its ecosystem. In September, the protocol announced that the first batch of startups in its accelerator program raised $13.2 million in seed funding.

Another $10 million was secured from the Web3Port Foundation to support investments in native DeFi protocols, and consumer and gaming applications within the Move network.