RISC Zero, a Seattle startup that creates infrastructure to help developers build zero-knowledge proof software, announced Wednesday that it has raised $40 million in fresh Series A funding. The round was led by Blockchain Capital, and comes less than a year after a $12 million seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto, along with about a dozen other investors.
Zero-knowledge proofs, otherwise known as ZKPs, use cryptography to mathematically validate a transaction while preserving privacy, allowing one party (the prover) to provide another party (the verifier) with proof that they possess a certain piece of information without actually revealing that information. These allow entities, like financial institutions, to gather and share sensitive data without actually exposing personally identifiable information.
RISC Zero’s Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine platform enables developers to build ZK-powered applications with the convenience of conventional, blockchain-focused programming languages like Rust and C++. The company utilizes features like continuations, which are mechanisms for splitting a large program into several smaller segments that can be computed and proven independent of. This allows its platform to run programs of arbitrary complexity and scope while using standard computing platforms — a first in the blockchain industry, according to RISC Zero.
“Imagine a world where data privacy, security and trust are no longer concerns, where software supply chains are transparent and verifiable, and where a new generation of applications can harness the power of zero-knowledge computing to solve some of the most pressing challenges of the digital age,” Bart Stephens, a founder and managing partner at Blockchain Capital, said in a statement. “This is the promise of zero-knowledge computing and the reason we are investing in RISC Zero.”
In light of this recent funding, RISC Zero plans to bring its Bonsai computing program to market in order to allow developers to easily integrate ZKPs into both cloud and decentralized environments.
The company is also hiring, with several open tech positions available now.
