Intel Capital, Coinbase Ventures back blockchain startup StarkWare Industries’ Series A round

StarkWare Industries, an Israeli blockchain startup, has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm.

Paradigm was co-founded by Matt Huang, formerly a partner at Sequoia, and Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase. StarkWare Industries is the first investment that Paradigm leads. As part of this investment, Huang will join StarkWare’s board of directors

The latest equity round also drew support from Intel Capital, Sequoia, Atomico, DCVC, Wing, Consensys, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Collaborative Fund, Scalar Capital and Semantic Ventures, as well as existing investors Pantera, Floodgate, and Naval Ravikant.

Previously, the startup raised $6 million in a seed funding round completed in May 2018 with support from Pantera, Naval Ravikant, MetaStable, Floodgate, Polychain, Vitalik Buterin, Zcash Co., Arthur Breitman (Tezos), Da Hongfei (NEO), Bitmain, Elad Gil, Fred Ehrsam, Linda Xie, and others.

Founded in 2018, StarkWare has developed the zk-STARKS privacy feature, CoinDesk reported. It now aims to commercialize STARK, the zero-knowledge proof protocol. Its aims to solve two of the main challenges in the blockchain space: privacy and scalability, it said in its announcement.

“StarkWare will improve scalability and privacy in blockchains using STARK technology, providing cryptographic proofs that are zero-knowledge, succinct, transparent (no need for a trusted setup), and post-quantum secure,” StarkWare said in its website. “StarkWare will develop a full proof stack: software and hardware to support fast and reliable generation and verification of computational integrity proofs for general computations.”