StarkWare Industries is an Israeli blockchain infrastructure company founded in 2018. It sits at the intersection of cryptographic research and Ethereum scaling: the team invented and commercialized STARK proofs (Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge), a form of zero-knowledge cryptography that needs no trusted setup. From that research base the company built two production systems – StarkEx, a permissioned Layer 2 engine for high-throughput trading and NFT applications, and Starknet, a permissionless ZK-rollup on Ethereum. Beyond its core engineering work, StarkWare acts as a strategic corporate investor, backing projects that build on or extend its technology stack.
The company raised approximately $282 million across four rounds between 2018 and 2022, reaching an $8 billion valuation in its May 2022 Series D, which was led by Greenoaks Capital and included Tiger Global, Coatue, and existing backers. Earlier rounds brought in Paradigm, Sequoia, and Three Arrows Capital (the latter now defunct). No AUM figure is publicly disclosed for its investment activity specifically; StarkWare operates as a corporate strategic investor rather than a dedicated venture fund. In February 2024 it launched the STRK token, distributing a portion to early contributors, developers, and Starknet users.
Notable portfolio investments
- dYdX – perpetuals exchange that ran on StarkEx before migrating to its own Cosmos chain; an early flagship demonstrating StarkEx throughput.
- Immutable X – NFT and gaming Layer 2 co-built on StarkEx; one of the largest NFT settlement networks by transaction count.
- Sorare – football NFT fantasy platform running on StarkEx; reached $4.3 billion valuation in its own 2021 funding round.
- rhino.fi (formerly DeversiFi) – multi-chain DeFi bridge and trading layer built on StarkEx.
- Kakarot – EVM-compatible zkEVM written in Cairo, allowing Ethereum contracts to run natively on Starknet; received direct backing from StarkWare.
- Pragma Network – decentralized oracle for Starknet, backed as part of ecosystem infrastructure.
Public information on the full list of all 13 portfolio companies and specific deal terms is limited. Many investments take the form of grants or co-development agreements rather than disclosed equity rounds.
Team
Eli Ben-Sasson (President and co-founder) is a professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and one of the original academic inventors of STARK cryptography. His earlier work also contributed to zk-SNARKs and the Zcash protocol. Uri Kolodny (CEO and co-founder) is a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Mondria and Skai (formerly Kenshoo). Michael Riabzev and Shahar Papini are the other two co-founders, both with deep backgrounds in applied cryptography and computer science. The company employs over 100 people across Israel and remote offices.
Recent activity
The STRK token launch in February 2024 was the most significant recent event, followed by an ongoing airdrop and developer grant program to accelerate Starknet adoption. In 2024 StarkWare also open-sourced the Cairo prover (previously proprietary) under the Apache 2.0 license, a meaningful shift that lets third parties build and verify proofs independently. The company has pushed Starknet toward decentralization through a phased roadmap that includes decentralized sequencers and provers. On the partnership side, StarkWare deepened integrations with Ethereum core developers working on EIP proposals that make ZK proof verification cheaper on Layer 1.
StarkWare's competitive position rests on the mathematical properties of STARKs – no trusted setup, post-quantum resistance in theory, and fast proof generation at scale. The main challenge is developer adoption: Cairo, Starknet's native language, requires learning a new paradigm compared to Solidity. Rival ZK-rollups including zkSync Era, Polygon zkEVM, and Scroll all target Ethereum-compatible execution, which lowers their onboarding friction. How quickly the Starknet ecosystem closes that gap will determine whether the $8 billion valuation from 2022 holds up when liquidity eventually becomes relevant. For now, StarkWare remains one of the most technically credible teams in zero-knowledge infrastructure, with a real production track record through StarkEx and a growing on-chain ecosystem through Starknet.
