StarkWare Industries, an Israeli startup inventing technology to make blockchain scalable for mass adoption, has raised $100 million in a Series D round and is now valued at $8 billion, the company announced this week.
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StarkWare's Series D funding comes six months after its Series C, which valued the company at $2 billion. The new round led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, and includes Tiger Global and other new and existing investors.
StarkWare has deployed STARKs, a class of mathematical systems developed by company co-founder and President Eli Ben-Sasson and other computer scientists, to enable a far more efficient use of blockchain.
The company says its tech cuts fees by reducing the amount of information written to the blockchain and speeds up transactions by alleviating heavy blockchain congestion, as well as allowing blockchain to scale without any dilution of its original vision – the math ensures it remains a network that runs with absolute integrity.
"This is a vote of confidence for the tech stack we've built, which makes blockchain scalable for mass use, and cuts transaction fees incurred by users," StarkWare co-founder and CEO Uri Kolodny said.
"The math-based technology we've rolled out, known as STARKs, will serve businesses and the crypto community through thick and thin. We're encouraged that VCs are signaling their strong support, even in the midst of a bear market," Kolodny added.
StarkWare'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.
Applications have used StarkEx to facilitate transactions of more than half a trillion dollars. Since the NFT market emerged in 2021, the technology has also become popular for facilitating minting and trading NFTs, making minting 20,000 times cheaper than transacting directly on Ethereum.
In late 2021 StarkWare created the StarkNet Alpha platform, which any developer can use to build blockchain apps.
Ben-Sasson said that "Tomorrow's tech and economy will be heavily based on blockchain, and absolutely everyone developing it needs a solution to the congestion and high transaction fees we see today.
"We're delivering this to clients via StarkEx, which is saving them millions of dollars in transaction fees weekly and opening up new possibilities for them. But we want everyone to be able to use our tech, so we are building and constantly improving StarkNet, in the hope it will empower any developer to build ultra-efficient blockchain apps," he explained.
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