Following a $50 million Series C investment in November, StarkWare Industries secured a $100 million Series D round on Wednesday, valuing the Israeli business at $8 billion. Greenoaks Capital and Coatue spearheaded the fundraising, which also included Tiger Global.
StarkWare’s ZK-rollup technology, which handles blockchain congestion by compressing many transactions into ‘STARK proofs’ that are then handed down to the underlying blockchain, intends to offer efficient, economical blockchain transactions to the public.
StarkWare co-founders Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny sat down with host Frank Chaparro in this episode of The Scoop to discuss what their company has been working on and how their technology will allow blockchains to expand.
Kolodny believes that the trustless computational integrity afforded by StarkWare technology will be extremely beneficial to society:
“It delivers something that is dearly missing and dearly needed in modern societies and the way they’re doing their computation. That is something very simple: it is integrity — the ability to know that something was done the right way, even when you weren’t watching.”
Despite market bearishness, StarkWare’s recent fundraise demonstrates that VCs are optimistic about the prospects unleashed by StarkWare’s scaling technology and are eager to continue providing funding to the company.
StarkWare’s two products, StarkEx and StarkNet, are both Ethereum scaling solutions, with the former providing “scaling as a service” and the latter providing permissionless scaling. StarkNet launched early this year, allowing any developer to incorporate the platform into their product.
As Kolodny mentioned during the interview, StarkWare’s scalability solutions are a key infrastructure enhancement for blockchains:
“I often use this metaphor for the scaling of Manhattan going from single-story houses circa 17th century to high rises. And that’s the scaling of this limited real estate: Manhattan or the blockchain, we can allow it to scale. What I’m saying is that we don’t know of an upper bound to the height of these skyscrapers at any given moment in time. It may be the metal beams, it may be the glass — fundamentally we don’t know the limit.”
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