StarkWare

StarkWare Industries was founded in 2018 by Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Michael Riabzev, and Uri Kolodny. The company is headquartered in Netanya, Israel. StarkWare is a private company; it raised a $100M Series C in 2021 at a $2B valuation, and in 2022 raised a further $100M Series D at an $8B valuation. The core product is cryptographic scaling technology for blockchains, specifically based on STARK (Scalable Transparent ARgument of Knowledge) proofs — a family of zero-knowledge proof systems.

StarkWare develops zero-knowledge proof technology that allows blockchain computations to be verified off-chain and then settled on-chain at dramatically lower cost and higher throughput. The primary buyers are blockchain developers and decentralized application (dApp) teams building on Ethereum. The technical moat is the STARK proof system itself, for which Eli Ben-Sasson and collaborators published foundational academic research, and StarkWare holds related intellectual property. The engineering org works extensively in Rust, Cairo (a StarkWare-designed programming language for writing STARK-provable programs), and Solidity.

StarkWare's two main products are StarkEx and Starknet. StarkEx is a permissioned, application-specific scaling engine deployed by third-party projects — it has been used by dYdX (a decentralized derivatives exchange), Immutable X (an NFT platform), and Sorare. Starknet is a permissionless, general-purpose Layer 2 network on Ethereum, launched as a public mainnet in 2021, allowing any developer to deploy Cairo-based smart contracts. Cairo is the bespoke programming language StarkWare designed specifically for writing programs that can be efficiently proven with STARK proofs.

StarkWare operates in the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling space alongside direct competitors including Matter Labs (which builds zkSync using a different zero-knowledge proof system called SNARKs/PLONKish arithmetic) and Polygon (which offers multiple scaling approaches including Polygon zkEVM). The key technical distinction StarkWare emphasizes is that STARKs require no trusted setup, unlike many SNARK-based systems. The sector has strong tailwinds from Ethereum's own roadmap, which explicitly positions rollups as the primary scaling path.

StarkWare's main office is in Netanya. The founders include Israeli academics and technologists; Eli Ben-Sasson is a professor at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa and is one of the original inventors of the STARK proof system. The company primarily hires for cryptography research, compiler engineering (Cairo language toolchain), and blockchain infrastructure roles.