Quick take:
- Polychain Capital led the round with participation from ABCDE, Bloccelerate, Generative Ventures, Robot Ventures and Samsung Next.
- Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kanaan also joined as angel investors.
- Pi Squared is developing a technology suite that enables verifiable computing with zero-knowledge proofs.
Pi Squared a Web3 startup led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign computer science professor, Grigore Rosu has raised $12.5 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital.
The fundraising also attracted participation from ABCDE, Bloccelerate, Generative Ventures, Robot Ventures and Samsung Next, with Justin Drake of Ethereum Foundation and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kanaan joining as angel investors.
Pi Squared is using zero-knowledge technology to build products for what it calls “trustless remote computing”. Its first product dubbed a ‘Universal Settlement Layer’ enables the settlement of blockchain transactions “claims” in any programming language, Rosu told CoinDesk.
In a nutshell, Grigore is building what he calls a “Universal ZK Circuit”. The product can also be used to enable ‘trustless remote computing’ in AI and interoperable smart contracts for any decentralised application or blockchain, according to information on the company’s website. Rosu said in a press release on Tuesday that he did the research over many years with his students.
According to Pi Squared, the technology creates a universal and disarmingly small ZK circuit that checks the integrity of mathematical proofs, which provide verifiable-computing correctness guarantees to all languages and virtual machines (VMs) alike directly from their formal semantics, without any translation to a common language, VM or instruction set architecture (ISA).”
Designed for builders, Pi Squared is still in its proof-of-concept phase but Rosu’s goal is to have the project in testnet by the end of the year.
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