StarkWare closes new $30 million equity round to develop cryptographic proof privacy technology

StarkWare Industries, a provider of cryptographic proofs that are zero-knowledge announced today it has closed a $30 million equity round, led by Paradigm. Other new investors include Intel Capital, Sequoia, Atomico, DCVC, Wing, Consensys, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Collaborative Fund, Scalar Capital and Semantic Ventures. Existing investors Pantera, Floodgate, and Naval Ravikant also participated in the round.

StarkWare commercializes the STARK zero-knowledge proof system. Its co-founders are Prof. Eli Ben-Sasson (Technion), Prof. Alessandro Chiesa (UC Berkeley), Uri Kolodny, and Michael Riabzev. The team is made of experts in zero-knowledge proof systems and engineering, to solve two of the main challenges in the blockchain space: privacy and scalability.

Matt Huang, of Paradigm, will join StarkWare’s board of directors. Paradigm was co-founded by Matt, formerly a partner at Sequoia, and Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase.

Back in May 2018, the StarkWare team completed a $6M seed funding round. Further, in earlier this month, StarkWare received $4 million with 6K ETH in performance-based bounties from the Ethereum Foundation.