RISC Zero raises $40 million in Series A led by Blockchain Capital

RISC Zero, the startup building a virtual machine based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), привлек $40 million in its Series A financing round.

Led by Blockchain Capital, it was joined by Bain Capital Crypto, the lead investor in the previous round. Other participants included Galaxy Digital, IOSG, RockawayX, Maven 11, Fenbushi Capital, Delphi Digital, Algaé Ventures, IOBC and Alchemy.

“RISC Zero’s mission is to provide developers and providers of cryptographic tooling infrastructure with support for the next generation of trustless, scalable, and decentralized computations both on- and off-chain,” the press release said.

The RISC Zero ZK virtual machine (zkVM) enables building ZKP-based applications using traditional programming languages such as Rust and C++. The expanded capabilities of the solution allow running programs of arbitrary complexity and size, the team said.

The startup will deploy the funding to bring its own computing platform Bonsai to market. The solution supports developing and deploying applications in both cloud and decentralized environments.

In the second quarter, investments in the Web3-segment fell 76% from the prior period to $1.8 billion.