Helius launched in 2022, founded by Mert Mumtaz, as an RPC provider for Solana developers. RPCs are the unglamorous plumbing that lets applications read and write to a blockchain — boring infrastructure that nobody thinks about until it breaks. Helius’s pitch was simple: Solana’s public RPCs were unreliable, commercial alternatives were expensive and slow, and developers deserved better.
What separated Helius from other RPC providers was Mumtaz himself. He became the most visible Solana evangelist on Crypto Twitter, known for deeply technical threads explaining how Solana actually worked, aggressive debates with Ethereum maxis, and a willingness to admit Solana’s problems publicly. This personal brand became Helius’s growth engine. Every new Solana dev team knew who Mert was and defaulted to Helius RPCs.
By 2024, Helius was serving billions of requests per day across hundreds of Solana protocols. Jupiter, Kamino, Drift, Tensor, and pump.fun all ran on Helius infrastructure. The company expanded beyond basic RPCs into enriched APIs, webhooks, NFT indexing, DAS (Digital Asset Standard) support, and developer tooling that made building on Solana dramatically easier than building on comparable chains.
In 2024, Helius raised a $9.3M Series A led by Foundation Capital. In late 2024, the company announced Helius Mobile — a consumer Solana wallet aimed at making the mobile Solana experience competitive with CEX apps. Helius’s evolution from RPC vendor to full-stack Solana infrastructure company mirrors what Alchemy did for Ethereum. When a chain becomes a platform, the platform needs a developer-first provider that wraps the complexity in nice APIs. Helius became that for Solana, and Mert became Solana’s most reliable on-chain weatherman.
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