We are excited to announce that CoinFund has led a $5M funding round in Sindri, a leading team working in the area of zero knowledge proofs. Sindri has built a platform for scaling zero knowledge devops and proving infrastructure, making proof generation significantly easier for decentralized app developers and zero knowledge-based Layer 2s.

After years of development, zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are having their 0-to-1 moment in 2023. zkSync, the first of the next-generation zkVMs, launched on mainnet in March 2023 and currently has a run rate of hundreds of thousands of proofs per year and growing rapidly (L2beat). In the last 8 months, ZK verification generated $28M in fees (Dune). As other ZK rollups also execute on their mainnet ambitions and L2 adoption increases, the consumption of ZKPs is likely set to grow rapidly in the coming years.

The interest around zero knowledge and its early applications in the blockchain space is creating an entirely new industry with a supply chain for specifying, managing, and validating ZKPs. There is already early demand beyond L2s in other blockchain scalability and applications, like offchain co-processors, storage proofs and AI (zkML.) ZKPs are also making their way into the traditional technology sector, enhancing Web 2.0 privacy, government databases, and corporate computation to be fully confidential and verifiable.

As more and more of the builders we talk to have started incorporating zero knowledge, some of the barriers to developer adoption have become apparent. Designing and optimizing circuits for cost and performance is difficult, and developers with experience are hard to come by. Hosting and maintaining ZKP infrastructure is cumbersome and requires precious developer resources. Deploying to different chains and dynamically integrating across multiple DSLs is a pain and hard to master. In short, the barriers to build with ZKPs need to come down in order to make the technology broadly adopted. Sindri provides the developer tools to handle the new tasks and challenges created by the zero knowledge supply chain.

Sindri can improve developer productivity through an intuitive, framework-agnostic platform. Their serverless solution provides developers with the low-latency deployment, fast end-to-end proving speeds and on-demand scalability. As the category evolves, developers can easily adapt to emerging protocols and standards to future proof their builds. On a mission to verify the integrity of the world’s data, Sindri is built for a diverse user base including zkML platforms, Layer 2’s, ZK co-processors, ZK researchers, and emerging commercial and public sector organizations in Web 2.0 seeking to leverage ZKP.

Having experienced the challenges of ZKP development while building with it on a common project, the Sindri team has been building a solution for the past year. Stasia Carson, Nick Pann, and Derek Styer have known each other for over a decade, drawing heavily from their ties to high performance compute and signal processing to build the beginnings of Sindri. While refining the vision and product, they have been able to attract some of the best technical talent and PhDs in the space, with several patents and decades-long experience in secure and trustless networks, and the intelligence community.

We’re honored to partner with Sindri on the journey to create a new category for ZK devops and help get zero knowledge into the hands of millions of developers in the future.

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