Fermah Closes $5.2M Seed Round to Abstract Away the Complexity of ZK Proof Generation
NEW YORK, Sept. 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Fermah, the universal proof generation layer, has announced the successful closure of its $5.2 million seed round, co-led by the a16z CSX fund and Lemniscap. The round also included participation from Bankless Ventures, Longhash Ventures, P-OPS team, Public Works, ZK Validator, Lambda Class, Daedalus, Zero DAO, Velocity Capital, and Daemon Ventures.
Fermah Closes $5.2M Seed Round to Abstract Away the Complexity of ZK Proof Generation
A number of S-tier builders also participated as angels in the round, including former Coinbase CTO and a16z GP Balaji Srinivasan; Celestia's Mustafa Al-Bassam (CEO) and Nick White (COO); Co-founders of Polygon, Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani, and Daniel Lubarov; as well as Aztec's Zac Williamson (CEO) and Claire Kart (CMO); and several others.
The funding will go towards product development and team expansion, with Fermah currently hiring for a number of key roles, as part of the company's vision to make zero-knowledge proofs the default substrate for all computation.
Fermah was founded by seasoned cryptographer Vanishree Rao, who has dedicated the last 15 years to designing and building Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), and holds a PhD in Cryptography from UCLA. Vanishree was also the Lead Cryptographer at O(1) Labs — the team behind Mina Protocol, one of the earliest and most innovative ZK protocols. She has extensive experience working with cryptographic primitives including secure hash functions, advanced digital signature schemes, ZKPs, multi-party computation protocols, key exchange protocols, and program obfuscation.
While ZKP technology is slowly becoming practical enough to power broad, modern applications, the generation of proofs remains extremely resource-intensive, requiring expensive, powerful physical infrastructure. The underutilization of this hardware inflates the price users pay for their ZK transactions. Beyond this, designing, implementing, and maintaining the optimal incentive structure for this infrastructure is extremely onerous.
Fermah — which is optimized for cheap, fast, and reliable ZK proof generation — is addressing this long-standing complexity issue inherent to
