Israeli blockchain startup StarkWare Industries successfully raised $30 million in its Series A round headed by Paradigm. The equity round received support from other companies including Atomico, Sequoia, Inter Capital, Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Wing, DCVC, Collaborative Fund, Semantic Ventures, and Scalar Capital. Existing investors of StarkWare Floodgate, Pantera and Naval Ravikant also contributed in the Series A round funding.
Paradigm leads first investment for Israeli blockchain startup
Co-founded by Fred Ehrsam who also co-founded Coinbase and Matt Huang, a former Sequoia partner, StarkWare Industries is the first investment led by Paradigm. Huang will be a part of the board of directors of StarkWare. Prior to this, the startup completed a seed funding round in May this year and raised $6 million with support from Floodgate, MetaStable, Pantera, Polychain, Naval Ravikant, Arthur Breitman (Tezos), Elad Gil, Vitalik Buterin, Zcash Co., Fred Ehrsam, Bitmain, and Linda Xie.
StarkWare recently developed a privacy feature termed zk-STARKS and now is planning to commercialize a zero-knowledge proof protocol STARK. The Israeli blockchain startup aspires to find a solution to two of the main challenges haunting the blockchain field. These include scalability and privacy.
In its announcement, the company stated, “StarkWare will develop a full proof stack: software and hardware to support fast and reliable generation and verification of computational integrity proofs for general computations.”
StarkWare to develop hardware and software solutions
The official website of StarkWare says that the Israeli blockchain startup is at present developing both hardware and software solutions for leveraging Zk-starks so that the public blockchain networks can easily add privacy functionalities to their individual and group networks. In its funding announcement StarkWare said that the company has assembled an international team of experts in engineering and zero-knowledge proof systems for solving challenges in the blockchain space.
Coinbase Ventures has been steadily increasing its investment frequency this year. Compound, a portfolio company of Coinbase recently introduced a platform that enables the institutions and individuals to earn interest by lending crypto to the traders who are on the lookout for short positions.
