Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor and member of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has unveiled her crypto-focused fund that has received much approval in 2022. Now her $1.5 billion team has announced its latest investment.
On Monday, it announced a seed round of $7.4 million for Sovereign Labs, a startup that hopes to make blockchain applications run faster and more efficiently.
“Our mission is to get the rest of the world into crypto,” Jem Yoser, CEO and co-founder of Sovereign Labs, said in a statement.
He and Preston Evans, the other co-founder and CTO, are building a developer interface that helps programmers more quickly produce blockchain applications that run on zero-knowledge proofs, a form of cryptography used to reduce the work and time required to verification of blockchain transactions.
Their project may seem less glamorous than another NFT crash or the opening of a new crypto exchange, but after the FTX crash, blockchain infrastructure is re-attracting investors who are wary of overhyped, headline-grabbing startups. “Crypto bear markets are a particularly attractive time to build infrastructure projects,” said Chris Ahn, partner at Haun Ventures. Happiness.
Haun’s investment in Sovereign Labs follows other recently announced cash infusions into companies focused on core Web3 technology. Blockstream, a crypto mining and infrastructure team, announced last week that it has raised $125 million to expand operations. And QuickNode, another crypto infrastructure firm, announced on the same day an infusion of $60 million, raising its estimated valuation to $800 million.
While Sovereign Labs’ round may pale in comparison to those, the cash flow, Evans said Happinesswill allow the firm to expand beyond three employees – which includes the co-founders – and work to complete a prototype of its developer kit in the coming months.
“With zero-knowledge proofs, a mobile phone can easily verify the operation of an entire data center. But zero-knowledge building has historically only been available to a few cryptography PhD students,” Evans added. “At Sovereign Labs, we build tools that are accessible to normal developers.”
Anne from Haun Ventures agreed. “Building a scalable network 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 that goal.”
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