Richard Ma is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Quantstamp, a blockchain security company launched in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Alongside his operating role at Quantstamp, Ma is active as an angel investor in early-stage crypto and Web3 projects, with a reported portfolio of around seven companies. His investment thesis closely mirrors Quantstamp's focus: infrastructure, security, and developer tooling that underpins decentralized systems.
Ma studied at McGill University and later built a career in software engineering before moving into blockchain full-time. Quantstamp became one of the most recognized smart contract audit firms in the industry, having reviewed code for protocols including Ethereum 2.0 deposit contracts, OpenSea, Compound, and several other major DeFi and NFT platforms. That operating experience – sitting inside the security layer of dozens of live protocols – gives Ma an informed vantage point when evaluating early-stage projects as an angel.
Notable investments
Public information about Richard Ma's personal angel portfolio is limited. No centralized disclosure – Crunchbase, AngelList, or SEC filings – lists the full set of seven portfolio companies attributed to him. What is documented is Quantstamp's own work with a wide range of teams, some of which Ma may have backed personally. Without confirmed deal-level data, specific investment names are not listed here to avoid inaccuracy.
Team
As an individual angel, Richard Ma operates without a formal fund structure or named partners. His primary professional identity remains as CEO of Quantstamp, where he works alongside co-founder Steven Stewart (CTO). The two built Quantstamp after participating in Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch – an experience that sharpened the company's go-to-market approach and connected them to a broad network of founders and early-stage backers.
Recent activity
Through 2024 and into 2025, Ma remained publicly engaged in conversations around smart contract risk, DeFi exploit patterns, and the maturation of on-chain security standards. Quantstamp has continued publishing audit reports and expanding its coverage of layer-2 networks and cross-chain bridges – areas that saw a surge in both deployment and exploit activity. Whether Ma has made new angel investments in this period is not publicly confirmed.
With a small, focused portfolio and a day job running one of crypto's most established security firms, Richard Ma fits the profile of an operator-angel: someone who writes occasional checks into projects he can help directly, rather than deploying capital at scale. His geographic base in the United States and deep ties to the Ethereum ecosystem suggest continued interest in infrastructure-layer opportunities. Public information beyond his Quantstamp role remains sparse, and any fuller picture of his angel activity would require direct disclosure on his part.
