"Ligero Raises $4M for ZKP Breakthrough, Galaxy & 1kx Lead"

Crypto startup Ligero, specializing in zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology for data privacy and security, has secured $4 million in a seed funding round. The round was co-led by Galaxy Ventures and 1kx, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Nascent, Anagram, Robot Ventures, Digital Currency Group, and ZKV. The funding was raised between March and July 2024, timed with the launch of Ligero's core product, Ligetron.

The seed round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants, raised at a $20 million valuation cap. Ligero has now raised a total of $5.15 million, including a $1.15 million round in 2019. Wei Dai, research partner at 1kx, has joined Ligero's board of directors as part of the deal.

Founded in 2018, Ligero builds tools to simplify ZKP development, deployment, and scaling without compromising security or compliance. Its core product, Ligetron, is a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) designed for high-speed performance across both browsers and advanced hardware. Ligetron is described as a breakthrough for ZKPs, similar to DeepSeek for large language models (LLMs). Benchmark tests show Ligetron achieving 66x faster LLM inference and 1,024x better memory efficiency than competitors.

For ZK rollups and validiums, Ligetron can handle 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a single NVIDIA L40S GPU while using less than 2 GB of CPU RAM, with linear scaling across multiple GPUs. Even a browser-based implementation can achieve around 100 TPS, pointing to potential applications in mobile-based ZK rollups.

The development of Ligetron took about seven years. After raising its first round in 2019, Ligero built a dark pool auction platform using multiparty computation (MPC). In 2020, Ligero received a four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the Securing Information for Encrypted Verification and Evaluation (SIEVE) program to improve zero-knowledge proofs. This research became the foundation of Ligero's current technology, leading