Subzero Labs announces its emergence from stealth with a $20 million initial financing round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from other top-tier investors including Variant, Coinbase Ventures, Hashed, Susquehanna Crypto, Mysten Labs, Fabric Ventures, Flowdesk, Mirana Ventures, and more.
Founded by Ade Adepoju and Lu Zhang, early engineers at Mysten Labs who contributed to the Sui network, Subzero Labs draws on deep technical expertise from both Web2 and Web3. Prior to Zhang building Diem (Meta’s crypto initiative) and large-scale AI/ML infrastructure at Meta and Google, Adepoju developed distributed systems at Netflix and advanced microchips at AMD.
With years of deep involvement in multiple layer-1 protocols and decentralized applications, Adepoju and Zhang identified a significant gap between the goals of network infrastructure and app developers; a gap they will close by rebuilding decentralized infrastructure from first principles.
For years, blockchain teams have obsessed over raw transaction speed. But high TPS alone doesn’t make decentralized apps robust or functional. Without a seamless interface to real‑world data and services, even the fastest blockchains produce apps that feel disconnected, high-friction, boring to users, and frustrating for builders. Until we resolve real-world integration and liberate builders from tangled and fragmented infrastructure, decentralized apps will remain clunky, costly, and painfully slow to create.
Subzero Labs is building Rialo, a network that gives developers the building blocks to create global-scale decentralized apps, without integrating brittle third-party services. Rialo makes it possible to build decentralized apps with the responsiveness and reactivity of Web2 at a fraction of the complexity by offering native web connectivity, event-driven transactions, built-in privacy, among others while remaining infinitely scalable.
Rialo leverages RISC-V architecture and adds Solana VM compatibility, letting teams deploy existing programs out of the box while unlocking a richer feature set. From tokenized assets, to prediction markets, to global trading platforms, to AI agent orchestration, developers can build with familiar tools while delivering apps that outperform their centralized counterparts in both cost and user experience.
KEY QUOTE:
“Instead of shipping innovative products, too many brilliant teams are burning their runway gluing various pieces of poorly designed infrastructure together. We believe infrastructure should be invisible, fast, intuitive, and scalable. Rialo solves this and unlocks entirely new classes of applications that simply weren’t possible before.”
Ade Adepoju, Co-Founder of Subzero Labs
“Rialo is the only full stack network for real world applications – built by leading industry developers for developers. It’s rare to see such a high concentration of talent to drive this vision. We believe under Ade and Lu’s leadership the Subzero Labs will deliver the infrastructure that finally empowers developers to create decentralized products that are intuitive, useful, and relevant to everyday users.”
Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner of Pantera Capital
“What stood out to us was how Rialo makes off-chain interaction feel native — not bolted on. With the devnet already demonstrating event-driven execution and native web integrations, we see early signs of a system that can lower the barrier for real-world use cases. Subzero Labs isn’t just optimizing infra — they’re rethinking how developers and external systems actually connect to it.”
Baek Kim, General Partner of Hashed
“We are excited about the opportunity that comes with the growing range of real world assets.”
Bart Smith, Global Head of Digital Asset Strategy at Susquehanna International Group (SIG)
