Tech startup ZKP Ligero raises $4 million in seed round

Ligero, a cryptocurrency startup specializing in zero-knowledge proof technology (ZK) for data security and privacy, has successfully raised 4 million US dollars in a seed funding round.

According to Ligero’s announcement on Wednesday, Galaxy Ventures and 1kx led this round of fundraising, along with participation from Franklin Templeton, Nascent, Anagram, Robot Ventures, Digital Currency Group, and ZKV. Although the company started raising funds in March 2024 and completed in July 2024, the information was announced at the launch of Ligetron’s core product, as shared by co-founder Matt DiBiase.

This seed round was conducted in the form of a simple deal for future shares (SAFE) combined with the right to buy tokens, with a maximum valuation of $20 million. “Currently, we have no plans to issue tokens,” DiBiase added

The agreement also includes Wei Dai, a research partner at 1kx, joining the board of Ligero

With this funding round, the total amount raised by Ligero amounted to $5.15 million, including a $1.15 million funding round in 2019.

What is Ligero?

Founded in 2018, Ligero focuses on developing tools to simplify the development, deployment, and scaling process with ZK proofs while ensuring security and compliance. The company’s flagship product, Ligetron, is a high-performance ZK (zkVM) virtual machine optimized for smooth operation on both browsers and advanced hardware.

Ligetron is Ligero’s answer to “like DeepSeek for large language models (LLM)” and standard tests have proven that this product achieves LLM inference speed 66 times faster and memory efficiency exceeds competitors by 1.024 times.

For ZK rollups and validium, Ligetron can handle up to 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a single NVIDIA L40S GPU while using less than 2GB of CPU RAM, with the ability to linearly scale across multiple GPUs. Even a browser-based deployment can achieve around 100 TPS, demonstrating the potential application of ZK rollups on mobile devices.

The Ligetron development process has lasted for about 7 years. According to CTO Muthu Venkitasubramaniam, after the first round of funding in 2019, Ligero has built a dark pool auction platform using multi-party computation (MPC), marking an important step in the company’s technological innovation.

In 2020, Ligero received a four-year funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) within the framework of the Securing Information for Encrypted Verification and Evaluation (SIEVE) program to improve ZK proof technology. This research has become the current technological foundation of Ligero, helping the company focus on ZK innovation, as Venkitasubramaniam said.

“The next-generation DeFi, games, machine learning applications, and tokenization of real assets will depend on the ability to scale privacy. Existing security-focused chains are too cumbersome for practical applications and lack interoperability. Current ZK-SNARKs are not suitable for truly secure applications as they cannot run on the client side and require significant server-side hardware. In contrast, Ligetron is the only and first ZKVM with efficient memory, deployable on any device — from Raspberry Pi to NVIDIA H100 — providing stable performance and scalability,” Venkitasubramaniam explained.

The Ligero’s closest rivals are Aztec Noir and Polygon Miden, according to Venkitasubramaniam. Ligero’s ZK tools are designed to protect scalable data privacy across multiple industries, from DeFi and global finance to gaming and tokenization of physical assets, by integrating security into both on-chain and off-chain workflows.

Ligero plans to expand its team by adding 3 to 4 positions in technical and business development fields to support future growth.

Disclaimer: The article is for informational purposes only, not investment advice. Investors should research carefully before making decisions. We are not responsible for your investment decisions.

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Minh Anh