Ligero, a blockchain startup specializing in zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology for data privacy and security, has successfully raised $4 million in a seed funding round.
Galaxy Ventures and 1kx co-led the round, with further participation from Franklin Templeton, Nascent, Anagram, Robot Ventures, Digital Currency Group, and ZKV, Ligero announced on Wednesday. The firm first started raising in March 2024, closing the round in July 2024, coinciding with the launch of its flagship product, Ligetron, co-founder Matt DiBiase told The Block.
The seed round took the form of a straightforward agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, on a $20 million cap. Ligero has no plans to release a token in the near term, DiBiase said anyway.
Wei Dai, a research partner at 1kx, has joined the board of directors at Ligero as part of the investment agreement. The new round puts Ligero’s total funding at $5.15 million, up from a $1.15 million raise in 2019.
What is Ligero?
Ligero, founded in 2018, creates tools to make the process of developing, deploying, and scaling zero-knowledge proofs easier with security and compliance. Its flagship product, Ligetron, is a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) to provide high-speed performance on browsers and advanced hardware.
“Ligetron is to ZK what DeepSeek is to LLMs,” Ligero asserted, citing its high-performance feature. Benchmark tests indicate that Ligetron provides 66× faster large language model (LLM) inference and 1,024× improved memory efficiency compared to competitors.
For ZK rollups and validiums, Ligetron is capable of processing 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a single NVIDIA L40S GPU at less than 2 GB of CPU RAM, with linear scalability across multiple GPUs. Even in browser-based deployment, Ligetron can be around 100 TPS, reflecting its potential for mobile-based ZK rollups.
Ligero spent seven years developing Ligetron. Since it raised its first round of funding in 2019, the company first built a dark pool auction platform based on multiparty computation (MPC), co-founder, CEO, and CTO Muthu Venkitasubramaniam explained to The Block.
Ligero was awarded a four-year grant in 2020 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the Securing Information for Encrypted Verification and Evaluation (SIEVE) program to further pursue zero-knowledge proof research. This research served as the groundwork for Ligero’s existing ZK technology and innovation initiatives, Venkitasubramaniam explained.
“Next-generation DeFi, gaming, ML use cases, and real-world asset tokenization will heavily rely on scalable privacy,” Venkitasubramaniam said. “Existing privacy-oriented chains are too heavy for real-world usage and are not compostable. Existing ZK-SNARKs enabling L2 solutions are not designed for real privacy use cases since they cannot be executed client-side and demand a lot of server-side hardware. Ligetron, on the other hand, is the first and sole memory-efficient zkVM that can execute on any device – ranging from a Raspberry Pi to an NVIDIA H100 – providing consistent and scalable performance.”
Ligero’s nearest rivals are Aztec Noir and Polygon Miden. Nevertheless, the firm’s ZK tools are meant to promote scalable data privacy across sectors like DeFi, finance, gaming, and real-world asset tokenization. Ligero seeks to embed privacy into on-chain and off-chain workflows seamlessly.
Looking ahead, Ligero plans to expand its team by hiring three to four additional roles in engineering and business development to support its continued growth, DiBiase said.
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