| StarkWare Industries | |
| Type: | Private company |
| Industry: | blockchain |
| Hq Location City: | Netanya |
| Hq Location Country: | Israel |
| Area Served: | Worldwide |
| Key People: | Eli Ben-Sasson (CEO & President) Uri Kolodny (former CEO) Oren Katz (COO) Avihu Levy (CPO) |
| Products: | StarkEx, Cairo, Starknet |
| Num Employees: | 190 |
StarkWare Industries is an Israeli software company that specializes in cryptography. It develops zero-knowledge proof technology that compresses information to address the scalability problem of the blockchain, and works on the Ethereum platform.[1] In May 2022, the company's estimated value was $8 billion, an increase from $2 billion six months earlier.[2]
StarkWare Industries was founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson (CEO & President) from the Technion, one of the founders of Zcash,[3] [4] his former phd. student Michael Riabzev, Uri Kolodny (former CEO), and Alessandro Chiesa from UC Berkeley (chief scientist).[5] In April 2019 Technion sued Ben-Sasson and Riabazev for violating its Intellectual property.[6] The institute claimed that Ben-Sasson established StarkWare clandestinely, for his academic research without consent and demand 50% of his stake in the company. Ben-Sasson claimed that he didn't use any invention belonging to the Technion, merely based on StarkWares’ employees' knowledge.[7] In 2020 the two sides reached an agreement and Ben-Sasson left the Technion.[5] [8]
Starkware raised $6 million in seed money and afterward $30 million in series A round led by Paradigm, VC fund by Fred Ehrsam.[9] Other participants were Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Coinbase and Vitalik Buterin.[10] In March 2021 the company raised $75 million in series B round. It was led by Paradigm, along with other VCs such as Sequoia, DCVC, Pantera Capital, Wing, Alameda Research, and Founders Fund. In addition it received $12 million from the Ethereum Foundation.[5] In November 2021 StarkWare raised $50 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia, making its total raised money to $163 million and bringing its value to $2 billion, making it a Unicorn.[11] In May 2022 StarkWare raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue Management,[12] bringing its value to $8 billion. Series D was carried out despite a bear market.[2]
Starkware's scientific advisors include: Avi Wigderson, Shafi Goldwasser, Noam Nisan and Madhu Sudan. The company's advisors Include: Balaji Srinivasan, Joseph Lubin, Naval Ravikant, and Tom Glocer.[13] The company employs 190 people[14] and is located in Netanya.[10] [15]
Starkware develops technology called STARK, a type of non-interactive zero-knowledge proof, to improve the scalability in the blockchain.[7] It was founded on the basis of a theoretical research conducted by Ben-Sasson and Riabzev and others at the Technion in addition to mathematical models of zero knowledge proofs.[8] [16] The company develops technology based on this math to batch thousands transactions in a single batch, away from the basis layer of Ethereum. Each final update of each batch is written to Ethereum using a file of 80 kilobytes, which acts as a proof for the content in the batch.[2] This compression process increases the amount of data that can be accepted on a block of the blockchain and minimizes the energy needed for each transaction.[17] The energy consumption per transaction reduces by 200,000 times.[18]
StarkWare first offered its technology in the form of StarkEx, a proprietary scaling engine which was launched on Ethereum in June 2020.[11] It is used by Sorare,[14] Dydx,[19] Immutable X,[20] the web browser Opera,[21] and DeversiFi.[8] [2] In June 2021 StarkWare launched its second platform: Starknet. Unlike StarkEx, which is available to clients, Starknet is permissionless. Any developer can use it to build on it their scalable decentralized applications.[8] As of May 2022 there had been 100,000 downloads of developer tools to build on Starknet.[2] StarkWare's systems are programmed in the Cairo language, Turing complete programming language which was built by researchers and engineers from the company.[14]