StarkWare

StarkWare Industries is an Israeli software company pioneering zero-knowledge proof technology to solve blockchain scalability and privacy challenges. Founded in 2018 by cryptographers Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Michael Riabzev, and Uri Kolodny, the company develops two core products: Starknet, a permissionless decentralized ZK-Rollup enabling any developer to deploy dApps with unlimited scale using smart contracts; and StarkEx, a standalone ZK-Rollup SaaS supporting NFT minting and trading, derivative trading, AMMs, spot trading, payments, and DeFi Pooling. StarkWare's STARK proofs are zero-knowledge, succinct, transparent, and post-quantum secure — requiring no trusted setup. Having raised $250 million in equity plus a $12 million Ethereum Foundation grant, the company reached an $8 billion valuation and has processed over 277 million cumulative transactions. StarkWare developed the Cairo programming language for writing provable programs and open-sourced its Stone and Stwo provers to advance the broader ZK ecosystem.