Bain Capital leads $12m seed round for scalable blockchain startup RISC Zero

RISC Zero announced a $12 million seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto. Follow-on investors include Geometry, D1 Ventures and Cota Capital among others. Angel investors include Jing Wang of Optimism, Meltem Demirrors of Coinshares, Kain Warwick formerly of Synthetix, Marvin Ammori of Uniswap Labs, Eva Beylin and Tegan Kline of The Graph, and Calvin Liu formerly of Compound, Lev Livnev of Symbolic Capital Partners, and Lucas Vogelsang of Centrifuge.

This is RISC Zero's second round, after a $2 million pre-seed led by Geometry and Ramez Naam Ventures. RISC Zero is a startup with a humble mission, to fix the internet, by developing cutting-edge products utilizing zero-knowledge cryptography

RISC Zero believe that in order for the internet to be truly free, cloud computing technologies must be; cheap enough that anyone in the world can use them, accessible enough that any developer can build on them using standard programming languages, provide privacy options which give users and developers control over their digital identity and all of the data associated with it and must be owned by their users.

RISC Zero's first open source product was released in March 2022 - the RISC Zero zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). The zkVM enables any program to run in a verifiable manner with no trusted authorities. This seemingly simple property has profound implications for all aspects of distributed computing, but especially for blockchain-related technologies. Recent developments in zero-knowledge proofs have made the possibility of nearly infinite scalability not just a distant possibility, but a real eventuality – one that we are hard at work realizing.

Alex Evans, Partner, Bain Capital Crypto: "Zero knowledge proofs are integral to many important blockchain privacy and scalability efforts. Risc Zero has demonstrated the first zkVM that natively supports standard languages and tools such as C++ and Rust through LLVM. We're thrilled to partner with the RISC Zero team as they empower developers to realize the full potential of this technology." 

RISC Zero is building a next generation scalable blockchain using zero-knowledge proof technology along with our RISC-V zkVM. Our implementation allows developers who are used to programming in Rust, Go, C++ and other standard programming languages to write on-chain decentralized applications that look and feel like more traditional web applications – unlocking the potential of Web3 for a much broader swath of the global developer population.

Kobi Gukan, Co-founder, Geometry: "It was a mind-blowing experience checking out the early versions of RISC Zero and being able to run a game written in Rust, no less! The team has a unique approach and spirit and it shows"

A developer-oriented preview of RISC Zero's new network will be launched in Q3 2022. It will allow developers to build applications that utilize RISC Zero's core technological innovations ahead of the launch of its uniquely scalable blockchain.

www.risczero.com