Israeli blockchain firm StarkWare raises $50m in Series C round

Israeli blockchain firm StarkWare has secured $50 million in a Series C funding round, led by Sequoia Capital.

StarkWare co-founders Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny

The investment comes seven months after a $75 million Series B. The blockchain scaling firm is now worth $2 billion.

StarkWare’s cryptographic compression service allows blockchains to scale and is based on cryptographic technologies known as STARK proofs, invented by two of the company’s co-founders, Eli Ben-Sasson and Michael Riabzev, alongside other computer scientists.

The firm says increasing the ‘bandwidth’ of blockchain technology means it can be utilised by mass market apps and programs.

“Blockchains today simply can’t handle the volume of transactions required for mass use,” says Ben-Sasson, who is also president at StarkWare.

He adds that increasing capacity on the blockchain will help fulfil the technology’s aims of decentralising data.

“By empowering blockchains to scale globally, people of any economic status will gradually be able to stop entrusting data into the hands of big companies and control it themselves instead.”

The company claims its blockchain-based computational methods have already driven down transaction fees and the blockchain’s notorious carbon footprint.

StarkWare will aim to use the new cash to expand the roll out of its StarkNet platform to anybody looking to build blockchain apps.