Seattle-based blockchain company Risc Zero has raised a $12 million seed round.
The round, announced Tuesday, builds on a $2 million pre-seed round Risc Zero raised in March, according to Crunchbase. The company's technology uses what is known as "zero-knowledge" techniques, or authentication techniques that don't rely on passwords, according to HackerNoon.
Bain Capital Crypto led the seed round.
"Zero knowledge proofs are integral to many important blockchain privacy and scalability efforts," Alex Evans, partner at Bain Capital Crypto, said in a release. "We're thrilled to partner with the Risc Zero team as they empower developers to realize the full potential of this technology."
On its website, Risc Zero, founded this year, has open roles in engineering and people. It has seven open roles total.
According to the release, Risc Zero's technology allows developers to write decentralized applications using standard programming languages.
Brian Retford is listed on LinkedIn as the company's co-founder and CEO, and Frank Laub as the co-founder and chief technology officer. Retford's page notes he spent four years at Intel's processor chip company Movidius and six years as a software engineering manager at Google. Laub's profile says he spent about three years at Movidius.
On its careers page, Risc Zero says it plans "to fix the internet."
"The internet of today is largely owned by Amazon and its competitors, and users of most platforms on the internet have very little control over how their data is used," the careers page reads. "We believe that blockchain technology has the potential to create a more open internet where competition thrives and users own their own data."
Geometry, D1 Ventures, Cota Capital and multiple angel investors participated in the seed round. Bain Capital Crypto's portfolio includes the crypto company BlockFi and the gaming company Jadu.
