StarkWare Industries is an Israeli software company that specializes in
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...
. It develops
zero-knowledge proof
In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof (also known as a ZK proof or ZKP) is a protocol in which one party (the prover) can convince another party (the verifier) that some given statement is true, without conveying to the verifier any information ...
technology that compresses information to address the
scalability
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work. One definition for software systems specifies that this may be done by adding resources to the system.
In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that ...
problem of the
blockchain
The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...
, and works on the
Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-s ...
platform.
In May 2022, the company's estimated value was $8 billion, an increase from $2 billion six months earlier.
History
StarkWare Industries was founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson (CEO & President) from the
Technion, one of the founders of
Zcash
Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency based on Bitcoin's codebase. It shares many similarities, such as a fixed total supply of 21 million units.
Transactions can be transparent, similar to bitcoin transactions, or they can be shielded t ...
,
his former phd. student Michael Riabzev, Uri Kolodny (former CEO), and Alessandro Chiesa from
UC Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...
(chief scientist).
In April 2019 Technion sued Ben-Sasson and Riabazev for violating its Intellectual property.
The institute claimed that Ben-Sasson established StarkWare clandestinely, for his academic research without consent and demand 50% of his
stake in the company. Ben-Sasson claimed that he didn't use any invention belonging to the Technion, merely based on StarkWares’ employees' knowledge.
In 2020 the two sides reached an agreement and Ben-Sasson left the Technion.
Starkware raised $6 million in
seed money
Seed money, also known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor puts capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' suggest ...
and afterward $30 million in
series A round
A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in excha ...
led by
Paradigm Operations, VC fund by
Fred Ehrsam.
Other participants were
Intel Capital
Intel Capital Corporation started off as the investment arm of Intel Corporation in 1991 and in January 2025, it spun off as a standalone investment fund. Intel Capital makes equity investments in a range of technology startups and companies off ...
,
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...
,
Coinbase
Coinbase Global, Inc. is an American cryptocurrency exchange. It was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. Coinbase has over 100 million users, and is the largest U.S. based cryptocurrency exchange as well as the world's bigge ...
and
Vitalik Buterin
Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin (; born 31 January 1994), better known as Vitalik Buterin (), is a Canadian computer programmer and co-founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding ''Bitcoin Ma ...
.
In March 2021 the company raised $75 million in series B round. It was led by Paradigm, along with other VCs such as Sequoia, DCVC,
Pantera Capital, Wing, Alameda Research, and
Founders Fund
Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund formed in 2005 and based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $17 billion in total assets under management as of 2025. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration T ...
. In addition it received $12 million from the
Ethereum Foundation
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-sourc ...
.
In November 2021 StarkWare raised $50 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia, making its total raised money to $163 million and bringing its value to $2 billion, making it a
Unicorn
The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since Classical antiquity, antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn (anatomy), horn projecting from its forehead.
In European literature and art, the unico ...
.
In May 2022 StarkWare raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Greenoaks Capital and
Coatue Management
Coatue is an American technology-focused investment management firm led by founder and portfolio manager Philippe Laffont.
Coatue invests in both public and private markets, with a focus on technology, media, telecommunications, as well as the c ...
,
bringing its value to $8 billion. Series D was carried out despite a
bear market
A market trend is a perceived tendency of the financial markets to move in a particular direction over time. Analysts classify these trends as ''secular'' for long time-frames, ''primary'' for medium time-frames, and ''secondary'' for short time ...
.
Starkware's scientific advisors include:
Avi Wigderson
Avi Wigderson (; born 9 September 1956) is an Israeli computer scientist and mathematician. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America ...
,
Shafi Goldwasser
Shafrira Goldwasser (; born 1959) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. A winner of the Turing Award in 2012, she is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor o ...
,
Noam Nisan
Noam Nisan (; born June 20, 1961) is an Israeli computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his research in computational complexity theory and algorithmic game theory.
Biography
Ni ...
and
Madhu Sudan
Madhu Sudan (born 12 September 1966) is an Indian-American computer scientist. He has been a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2015.
Career
He received hi ...
. The company's advisors Include:
Balaji Srinivasan
Balaji S. Srinivasan (born May 24, 1980) is an American entrepreneur and investor. He was the co-founder of Counsyl, the former chief technology officer (CTO) of Coinbase, and former general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen ...
,
Joseph Lubin,
Naval Ravikant, and
Tom Glocer. The company employs 190 people
and is located in
Netanya
Netanya () () or Natanya (), is a city in the "Planet Bekasi" Central District (Israel), Setanyahu of Israel, Israel BAB ih, and is the capital of the surrounding Sharon plain. It is north of Tel Aviv, and south of Haifa, between the Poleg stre ...
.
Technology
Starkware develops technology called STARK, a type of
non-interactive zero-knowledge proof
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but ...
, to improve the scalability in the blockchain.
It was founded on the basis of a theoretical research conducted by Ben-Sasson and Riabzev and others at the Technion in addition to mathematical models of zero knowledge proofs.
The company develops technology based on this math to batch thousands transactions in a single batch, away from the basis layer of Ethereum. Each final update of each batch is written to Ethereum using a file of 80
kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for Computer data storage, digital information.
The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix ''kilo-, kilo'' as a multiplication factor of 1000 (103); therefore, one kilobyte is 1000&nbs ...
s, which acts as a proof for the content in the batch.
This compression process increases the amount of data that can be accepted on a block of the blockchain and minimizes the energy needed for each transaction.
The energy consumption per transaction reduces by 200,000 times.
StarkWare first offered its technology in the form of StarkEx, a