Nexus Laboratories, a zero-knowledge cryptography company, announced it raised $25 million in Series A funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pantera Capital. This funding round included participation from Dragonfly Capital, Faction Ventures, and Blockchain Builders Fund.
Nexus’ initial $2.2 million seed funding was led by Dragonfly in late 2022 and it included Alliance, SV Angel, and Blockchain Builders Fund. This latest funding round brings the company’s total funding to $27.2 million and underscores the growing interest in verifiable computation and zero-knowledge cryptography. This funding round will help accelerate the company’s go-to-market efforts and expand its engineering team.
Nexus is scaling zero-knowledge cryptography to make it faster, more secure, and easier to use. And zero-knowledge cryptography is a method that enables users to prove that statements and/or data are true without revealing the data that attest to the statements’ validity.
The largest source of demand for proof generation is coming from companies scaling and securing decentralized infrastructure. And Nexus expects to be able to support interest emerging in other areas too, including AI, cybersecurity, cloud computing, privacy-enhancing technologies and other areas of Internet infrastructure.
Earlier this month, the company revealed the Nexus 1.0, the first major release of its zero-knowledge virtual machine. And central to the Nexus 1.0 is the introduction of a new cryptographic technique enabling highly efficient proof aggregation. This system features a modular design to optimize and parallelize verifiable computation across clusters of machines. The Nexus 1.0 is available for developers to use today under MIT license. The company is also working with early adopters to integrate the system for a number of use cases.
The Series A funding round marks a pivotal moment for Nexus, enabling it to rapidly expand its product offerings, support early stage users in production deployments, and continue its engagement with the scientific community. And the company will also initiate support for the Nexus Network, a system powered by volunteer computing that will seek to break the record for the largest computation ever performed.
KEY QUOTES:
“Nexus aims to bring truth to the Internet. We want to bring to market an entirely new form of computation – verifiable computation. We believe this is a fundamental step for humanity, as was the advent of the Internet, cloud computing and AI. Our goal is to make zero-knowledge proofs accessible to any developer, and drive the cost of zero-knowledge proofs down by orders of magnitude.”
- Daniel Marin, founder and CEO of Nexus
“Nexus is pioneering the widespread adoption of zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring computations and data are not only protected but also verifiable. With the rise of AI and the increasing need for privacy preservation, verifiable computing is becoming essential. Nexus’s innovative approach promises to make these advanced cryptographic techniques practical and scalable, reducing costs dramatically and setting new standards for secure and efficient computation. Together with Faction, a Lightspeed joint venture, we are excited to partner with Nexus to advance the boundaries of cryptography and make verifiable computing accessible and practical on an unprecedented scale.”
- Ravi Mhatre, founder and managing partner of Lightspeed
“We expect that every decentralized network will see mission critical applications of zero-knowledge proofs. Nexus is focused on enabling zk-rollups, the largest source of demand for proof generation today. We believe there will be thousands of rollups powered by zk-proofs in the very near future, all which will require proof generation. Nexus has the team and technology to become a leading infrastructure player in this field.”
- Lauren Stephanian, general partner with Pantera Capital
“We first met Daniel when he was a computer science and cryptography student at Stanford. My firm led the seed investment in Nexus when Daniel graduated because we were impressed with his vision of a new paradigm for verifiable computation. He has assembled a world class team and we are really excited to support the company’s work to commercialize the Nexus 1.0 zero-knowledge virtual machine.”
- Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner with Dragonfly
