StarkWare is an Israeli cybersecurity startup that specializes in the development of solutions for enlarging blockchain capacity. The company just completed a $50 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. This round gave StarkWare a $2 Billion valuation making it yet another unicorn for Israel Startup Nation.
The new funding came just seven months after StarkWare raised $75 million in a Series B fundraising round this past March.
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Startup Nation keeps on setting records. It is also adding new unicorns on seemingly a daily basis. These companies are startups that are valued at at least $1 billion.
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StarkWare joins Lusha, the crowdsourced data community for B2B sales and marketing professionals, which hit unicorn status just a week ago when it raised $205 million in a Series B fundraising round. Lusha is now valued at $1.5 billion.
Also just seven days ago, Israeli startup OpenWeb, which offers a media readership engagement management platform, became a Unicorn. OpenWeb hit the coveted mark with a $150 million Series E financing round led by Insight Partners and Georgian Partners. OpenWeb has raised $220 million to date.
Founded in 2018 by President Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO Uri Kolodny, chief architect Michael Riabzev and chief scientist Alessandro Chiesa., StarkWare says that it solves the inherent problems of blockchains – scalability and privacy. The company develops a full proof stack, using STARK technology to generate and verify proofs of computational integrity. StarkWare boasts that its cryptographic proofs are zero-knowledge, succinct, transparent and post-quantum secure.
StarkWare says that it allows blockchains to massively scale by relying on cryptographic proofs produced by an off-chain prover running in the cloud, and then verified by an on-chain smart-contract. ZK-STARK proofs reveal no information regarding private inputs, and have no trusted setup. Combined with other cryptographic tools, ZK-STARK can be used to completely and provably protect user data.
“Blockchains today simply can’t handle the volume of transactions required for mass use,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-founder and President at StarkWare. “The math-based technology invented by StarkWare is the invisible hand that increases blockchain’s bandwidth, giving it the capacity to serve everyone.”
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We are excited to announce our Series C of $50M at $2B.
A big thanks to our lead investor, @sequoia, our wonderful follow-on investors, and the dozens of ecosystem partners and collaborators who participated in this round, for their vote of confidence in our products and tech. pic.twitter.com/CuaeMSf2s6
— StarkWare (@StarkWareLtd) November 16, 2021
“This valuation makes us more confident than ever in our vision. By empowering blockchains to scale globally, people of any economic status will gradually be able to stop entrusting data into the hands of big companies, and control it themselves instead.”