Zero-knowledge (ZK) hardware acceleration startup Cysic raises $12 million in Pre-Series A funding to advance the ZK revolution

Original source: Cysic

ZK hardware acceleration company Cysic announced the completion of a $12 million Pre-A round of financing led by Hashkey Capital and OKX Ventures. The project aims to provide zero-knowledge proof (ZK) verification in the fastest, cheapest, easiest and most decentralized way.

This round of financing includes well-known investment institutions such as ABCDE, Bit Digital, Coinswitch, IDG, Matrix Partners, Polychain, SNZ Holding, and Web3.com Ventures. In addition, other well-known angel investors such as DAO5 partner and Celestia's first investor George Lambeth and former Binance Labs Executive Director Ken Li also participated in this round of financing.

Founded in August 2022, Cysic has made its mark in the ZK hardware space, with the goal of providing real-time ZKP (zero knowledge proof) generation. The biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of ZK technology is that the CPU generates ZKP too slowly. Cysic not only excels in ASIC design and CPU engineering, but also continues to provide enterprise-level ZK computing services for multiple ZK projects.

HashKey Capital's Investment Manager Rui commented: "As an early investor in Cysic, we have been with them from the beginning and have increased our investment in this round. As Vitalik said, ZK technology will be the most important part of Ethereum's future. The key challenge in the ZK field is to achieve sufficient performance speed. In addition to algorithm improvements, hardware acceleration is also crucial. Cysic is an industry leader in this field and has developed GPU and FPGA solutions and is also ready for ASIC chips. Through cooperation with other ZK layer 1 and layer 2 projects, we believe Cysic will become an indispensable player in this field."

OKX Ventures partner Jeff Ren said: "We are excited to be part of Cysic's journey in revolutionizing the ZK hardware space. Cysic is committed to facilitating real-time ZK proof generation, which is consistent with our goal of supporting innovation that creates value for the Web3 ecosystem. We look forward to helping Cysic make ZK proof generation more efficient and accessible."

Cysic is committed to designing real-time generated ZKP ASICs. The team has previously mentioned in [articles] that the zkVM-based ASIC design makes the two products ZK Air and ZK Pro more flexible. Among them, ZK Air is close in size to a mobile power bank and a laptop power bank. Users can connect it to a laptop, iPad, or even a smartphone via a Type-C interface to provide acceleration for ZKP. The design of ZK Pro is similar to that of a traditional mining machine, aiming to maximize the generation speed of ZKP. The funds raised in this round of financing will be used to promote Cysic's global expansion, including recruiting new employees and investing in hardware production.

This article comes from a contribution and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.

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