Succinct raises $55M led by Paradigm to make zero-knowledge proofs accessible to any developer

Uma Roy

Mar 21, 2024 — 2 min read

We're thrilled to announce we've raised $55M led by Paradigm to make zero knowledge proofs accessible to any developer. The total raised comes across a Seed and Series A round with participation from Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry, ZK Validator and angels including Sreeram Kannan from Eigenlayer, Sandeep Nailwal and Daniel Lubarov from Polygon and Elad Gil.

ZK proofs are one of the most critical technologies to blockchain scaling, interoperability and privacy, but are too complex for most developers today. Succinct’s mission is to lower this barrier with our zkVM, SP1, and our decentralized prover network.

SP1 is the first 100% open-source zkVM performant enough to rival custom ZK circuits. With SP1, developers can use ZK with normal programming languages, reuse existing crates and libraries, and iterate quickly with auditable and maintainable code. SP1 shows that an extremely optimized, general-purpose system can match the performance of hand-written, specialized approaches that have historically been the only option.

The Succinct Prover Network, under active development, is a hosted infrastructure layer for any application to outsource proof-generation for open-source proof systems. Applications using SP1 (or other zkVMs) will be able to deploy programs to the network with 1 click and get fast, cheap proofs generated by a set of specialized provers. Users of this open protocol benefit from the networks’ economies of scale and strong liveness guarantees of a set of decentralized provers.

Get Involved

Today, teams like Celestia, Wormhole, Lido, Avail, Near, and Gnosis are using Succinct’s infrastructure to build ZK-enabled applications. We’re excited for SP1 and the Succinct prover network to make it possible for any developer to build with ZK. If you want to build a ZK application with maintainable and auditable Rust code, reach out today.

We’re hiring!

There’s still a lot more to build at Succinct to further accelerate ZK adoption. We are a small, highly-technical team based in San Francisco, that ships high-quality code at the frontier of ZK. We are hiring for a variety of engineering roles to continually improve SP1 and build towards the mainnet launch of our decentralized prover network. If this mission resonates with you, apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/succinct.

Acknowledgements

We’re excited to continue working with Paradigm, including collaborating with Dan Robinson on designing optimal mechanisms for proof pricing, Georgios Konstantopoulos on realizing an endgame vision of all blockchain infrastructure incorporating ZKPs built with Rust code, and of course Doug Feagin and Charlie Noyes for their unwavering support.

We’d also like to shout out the rest of our investors and advisors, including Daniel Lubarov from Polygon Zero, Jacob Arluck from Celestia, Tarun Chitra from Robot, and many others that have helped us on our journey.