Ligero, a blockchain startup specializing in zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) expertise for knowledge privateness and safety, has efficiently raised $4 million in a seed funding spherical.
Galaxy Ventures and 1kx co-led the spherical, with additional participation from Franklin Templeton, Nascent, Anagram, Robotic Ventures, Digital Forex Group, and ZKV, Ligero introduced on Wednesday. The agency first began elevating in March 2024, closing the spherical in July 2024, coinciding with the launch of its flagship product, Ligetron, co-founder Matt DiBiase informed The Block.
The seed spherical took the type of an easy settlement for future fairness (SAFE) with token warrants, on a $20 million cap. Ligero has no plans to launch a token within the close to time period, DiBiase stated anyway.
Wei Dai, a analysis associate at 1kx, has joined the board of administrators at Ligero as a part of the funding settlement. The brand new spherical places Ligero’s complete funding at $5.15 million, up from a $1.15 million increase in 2019.
What’s Ligero?
Ligero, based in 2018, creates instruments to make the method of growing, deploying, and scaling zero-knowledge proofs simpler with safety and compliance. Its flagship product, Ligetron, is a zero-knowledge digital machine (zkVM) to offer high-speed efficiency on browsers and superior {hardware}.
“Ligetron is to ZK what DeepSeek is to LLMs,” Ligero asserted, citing its high-performance characteristic. Benchmark checks point out that Ligetron supplies 66× quicker giant language mannequin (LLM) inference and 1,024× improved reminiscence effectivity in comparison with rivals.
For ZK rollups and validiums, Ligetron is able to processing 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a single NVIDIA L40S GPU at lower than 2 GB of CPU RAM, with linear scalability throughout a number of GPUs. Even in browser-based deployment, Ligetron might be round 100 TPS, reflecting its potential for mobile-based ZK rollups.
Ligero spent seven years growing Ligetron. Because it raised its first spherical of funding in 2019, the corporate first constructed a darkish pool public sale platform primarily based on multiparty computation (MPC), co-founder, CEO, and CTO Muthu Venkitasubramaniam defined to The Block.
Ligero was awarded a four-year grant in 2020 by the Protection Superior Analysis Initiatives Company (DARPA) beneath the Securing Data for Encrypted Verification and Analysis (SIEVE) program to additional pursue zero-knowledge proof analysis. This analysis served because the groundwork for Ligero’s present ZK expertise and innovation initiatives, Venkitasubramaniam defined.
“Subsequent-generation DeFi, gaming, ML use instances, and real-world asset tokenization will closely depend on scalable privateness,” Venkitasubramaniam stated. “Present privacy-oriented chains are too heavy for real-world utilization and aren’t compostable. Present ZK-SNARKs enabling L2 options aren’t designed for actual privateness use instances since they can’t be executed client-side and demand quite a lot of server-side {hardware}. Ligetron, alternatively, is the primary and sole memory-efficient zkVM that may execute on any gadget – starting from a Raspberry Pi to an NVIDIA H100 – offering constant and scalable efficiency.”
Ligero’s nearest rivals are Aztec Noir and Polygon Miden. However, the agency’s ZK instruments are supposed to promote scalable knowledge privateness throughout sectors like DeFi, finance, gaming, and real-world asset tokenization. Ligero seeks to embed privateness into on-chain and off-chain workflows seamlessly.
Trying forward, Ligero plans to develop its workforce by hiring three to 4 further roles in engineering and enterprise growth to assist its continued progress, DiBiase stated.
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