Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor and member of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, announced a fund focused on crypto in 2022. Now, her $1.5 billion outfit has announced its latest investment.
On Monday, it announced an initial $7.4 million funding round for Sovereign Labs, a startup that hopes to make blockchain applications run faster and more efficiently.
“Our mission is to onboard the rest of the world to crypto,” Cem Özer, CEO and cofounder of Sovereign Labs, said in a statement.
He and Preston Evans, cofounder and other CTO, built a developer interface that helps programmers more quickly produce blockchain applications that use zero-science proof, a form of cryptography used to reduce the work and time required to verify blockchain transactions.
The project may seem less flashy than the recent NFT drop or the opening of a new crypto exchange, but after the collapse of FTX, blockchain infrastructure is attracting renewed attention from investors who are wary of overhyped, headline-grabbing startups. “The Crypto bear market is an interesting time to build infrastructure projects,” said Chris Ahn, partner at Haun Ventures. fortune.
Haun’s investment in Sovereign Labs follows other recently announced cash infusions in companies focused on Web3 technology. Blockstream, a crypto mining and infrastructure company, announced last week that it has raised $125 million to expand its operations. And QuickNode, another crypto infrastructure company, announced on the same day an infusion of $60 million, increasing its value to approximately $800 million.
While Sovereign Labs’ round may pale in comparison to that, the cash influx, Evans said fortunewill allow the firm to expand beyond three employees-which includes cofounders-and be able to complete the prototype of its developer kit in the coming months.
“With zero-knowledge proof, mobile phones can easily validate the work of all data centers. However, buildings with zero knowledge have historically only been accessible to a few Ph.D.s in cryptography,” added Evans. “At Sovereign Labs, we make tools accessible to normal developers.”
Ahn of Haun Ventures agrees. “Building scalable networks without sacrificing decentralization is one of the biggest opportunities in crypto,” he said. “Zero knowledge has a strong chance of being the technology that helps us achieve this goal.”
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