StarkWare Industries Raises $100M; Valued at $8 Billion

Uri Kolodny and Eli Ben-Sasson
Blockchain pioneers: (left to right) Uri Kolodny, Co-founder and CEO of StarkWare, and Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-founder and President. StarkWare builds technology to scale blockchain so it can be more widely used. The company was just valued at $8B. (Credit: Natalie Schor)

StarkWare Industries, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based inventor of technology to make blockchain scalable for mass adoption, raised $100M at a valuation of $8 billion.

The new round led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, and includes Tiger Global and other new and existing investors. There is a secondary transaction as part of the round, in which employees company-wide are selling stocks.

Led by Co-founder and CEO Uri Kolodny, StarkWare has deployed STARKs, a class of mathematical systems developed by company Co-founder and President Eli Ben-Sasson and other computer scientists, in order to enable far more efficient use of blockchain. It cuts fees by reducing the amount of information written to the blockchain, speeds up transactions by alleviating heavy blockchain congestion, and provides a way for blockchain to scale without any dilution of its original vision – the math ensures it remains a network that runs with absolute integrity.

The company’s first platform, StarkEx, in use for two years, today handles more transactions than Bitcoin. It compresses them using STARKs, before adding them to the Ethereum blockchain. Businesses in finance and NFTs use it to overcome the problem of crippling congestion on blockchain, which causes delays and high transaction fees.

FinSMEs

26/05/2022