Ligero, a crypto startup focused on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology for data privacy and security, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round.

Galaxy Ventures and 1kx co-led the round, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Nascent, Anagram, Robot Ventures, Digital Currency Group and ZKV, Ligero said Wednesday. The firm began raising for the round in March 2024 and closed in July 2024, but timing the announcement with the launch of its core product, Ligetron, co-founder Matt DiBiase told The Block.

The seed round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, raised at a $20 million valuation cap, DiBiase said. There are "no plans for a token at the moment," he added.

As part of the deal, Wei Dai, research partner at 1kx, has joined Ligero's board of directors, DiBiase said.

With this round, Ligero has raised a total of $5.15 million, including a $1.15 million round in 2019.

Founded in 2018, Ligero builds tools to simplify zero-knowledge proof development, deployment and scaling without compromising security or compliance. Its core product, Ligetron, is a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) designed for high-speed performance across both browsers and advanced hardware.

Ligetron "is for ZK what DeepSeek is for LLMs [large language models]," Ligero claimed. Ligetron benchmark tests show Ligetron achieving 66× faster LLM inference and 1,024× better memory efficiency than competitors, according to Ligero.

For ZK rollups and validiums, Ligetron can handle 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a single NVIDIA L40S GPU while using less than 2 GB of CPU RAM, with linear scaling across multiple GPUs, Ligero said. Even a browser-based implementation can achieve around 100 TPS, it added, pointing to potential applications in mobile-based ZK rollups.

The development of Ligetron took about seven years. After raising its first round in 2019, Ligero built a dark pool auction platform using multiparty computation (MPC), co-founder, CEO and CTO Muthu Venkitasubramaniam told The Block.

In 2020, Ligero received a four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the Securing Information for Encrypted Verification and Evaluation (SIEVE) program to improve zero-knowledge proofs. This research became the foundation of Ligero's current technology, leading to its focus on ZK innovation, Venkitasubramaniam said.

"The next-gen DeFi, gaming, ML [machine learning] applications, and real-world asset tokenization will crucially depend on scalable privacy," according to Venkitasubramaniam. "Existing privacy-focused chains are simply too cumbersome for practical use and lack composability. Existing ZK-SNARKs powering L2 technology are not suited for true privacy applications given that they can't run client-side and require significant hardware on the server side. By contrast, Ligetron is the first and only memory-efficient ZKVM that can be deployed on any device — from a Raspberry Pi to an NVIDIA H100 — delivering consistent and scalable performance."

Ligero's closest competitors are Aztec Noir and Polygon Miden, Venkitasubramaniam said. Ligero's ZK tools are designed to secure scalable data privacy across industries, from DeFi and global finance to gaming and real-world asset tokenization, by integrating privacy into both on-chain and off-chain workflows, according to the firm. 

Ligero plans to expand its team by adding three to four roles in engineering and business development to support future growth, DiBiase said.

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