NEBRA, a young crypto startup from England, has secured $4.5 million in funding through a Pre-Seed and Seed investment round led by Nascent and Bankless. The company focuses on research and development in the areas of blockchain technology privacy enhancement and scaling strategies using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP).
In addition to these investors, notable angel backers such as Tim Beiko, Kartik Talwar, Nick White, Sandy Peng, and Haichen Shen have also supported the project.
NEBRA has also been accepted into the a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator as part of the CSX Spring 2024 cohort in London. The newly raised funds will be used to further explore ZKP technology’s potential for reducing proof settlement costs on the Shared Settlement Layer (SSL) of the internet.
Zero-knowledge proofs provide a promising solution for maintaining privacy on blockchains, but they can be expensive. Collectively, users in the Ethereum ecosystem paid over $50 million in gas fees for these technologies during 2023. During a stress test held by UPA, a tool developed by NEBRA, an impressive level of resilience was demonstrated when processing 1 million proofs within just 36 hours.
Dan Elitzer, co-founder of NEBRA, envisions his company as a revolutionary platform that brings scale to blockchain ZKP settlements while offering cost-effective solutions for users across various sectors of the blockchain ecosystem. He believes that this pioneering approach will have a similar impact to Google and Uber on their respective fields.