Lagrange raises $13M to build blockchain-based cryptographic ‘big data’ scale computation

Lagrange Labs, a startup building the blockchain-based cryptography protocol Lagrange, today announced it raised $13.2 million in seed funding led by Peter Theil’s Founders Fund to progress its vision of scaling verifiable computation over blockchain at “big data” scale.

The funding round also attracted investments from Archetype Ventures, 1kx, Maven11, Fenbushi Capital, Volt Capital, CMT Digital and Mantle Ecosystem Fund. The company said that it would use the funding to accelerate the development of its technology stack and build its ecosystem of partner projects.

The name “Lagrange” was inspired by the mathematician and astronomer Joseph Lagrange, who discovered the phenomena of Lagrange points, positions in space between two celestial bodies – such as the Earth and moon where the gravitational pull between the two almost cancels out creating points of stability in space for satellites. The company uses the name to refer to how its protocol produces stability for blockchain applications.

Lagrange provides what the company calls a ZK Coprocessor, a type of technology that scales data and computation across blockchains using cryptography for decentralized applications to access. Using the ZK Coprocessor decentralized apps can ingest large-scale data from SQL queries with zero knowledge of their origin, protecting the privacy of their producers, at a low cost to users. The company said the coprocessor is also highly parallelizable, meaning that it is highly scalable for large batches of data.

Examples of what it could be used for include decentralized finance, improving on-chain reward systems at scale and welding together blockchain and artificial intelligence data – which requires tremendous amounts of data to be ingested and processed.

“Over the last two years, we’ve watched Lagrange grow from a small startup experimenting with new cryptographic primitives to a company with multiple networks in production,” said Ismael Hishon-Rezaizadeh, founder and chief executive of Lagrange Labs. “Our progress has been entirely rooted in our team’s commitment to both innovating on foundational cryptography and to commercializing our own innovations.”

Since the company’s launch, Lagrange has integrated with numerous blockchain projects including crypto staking startup Eigen Labs’ EignLayer, Coinbase Inc.’s Base, interoperability protocol LayerZero Labs Inc., stablecoin issuer Frax Finance and more. Lagrange launched the first ZK Coprocessor testnet, “Euclid” and generated more than 40,000 proofs total and rolled out a network of over 40 node operators.

Hishon-Rezaizadeh said that looking ahead the company plans to launch the mainnet for the ZK Coprocessor in late May, which will allow developers and protocol ecosystem partners to build on onchain applications using it as part of their big data scaling.

Image: Shutterstock/Dilok Klaisataporn