We're thrilled to announce that NovaNet has closed a $3 million seed funding round led by Finality Capital Partners with additional participation from Arrington Capital, the Avalanche Foundation, and Builder Capital. This milestone propels our mission to build the world's first incentive layer for zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs) that run everywhere. NovaNet enables local verifiable computation and privacy-preserving applications at scale secured by mathematics.
While many consider ZKP technology primarily as a means to scale Ethereum with zk-rollups (often at the exclusion of privacy), NovaNet offers a different paradigm. Our innovative approach empowers anyone, anywhere, to utilize ZKP for a wide range of applications beyond traditional zk-rollups, such as AI, DePIN, and gaming.
NovaNet operates on a cutting-edge zkVM based on the NIVC (non-uniform incremental verifiable computation) paradigm, which supports the a'la'carte selection of circuits for optimized memory and performance.
With NIVC, you only pay for what you use!
This stands in stark contrast to many monolithic hashing-based systems, which often have high memory overheads and require specialized hardware to run. NovaNet's NIVC-based model allows any proof system or hardware-accelerated prover to join the network and contribute.
NIVC allows developers to choose the step size for their needs: small circuit step sizes when applications need to run on constrained local devices such as phones or browsers, and large step sizes when speed is priority.
Novel or specialized proving schemes can join NovaNet and earn a premium. This ensures that the best technology is employed for the job, whether it's for zero knowledge machine learning or highly memory-efficient mobile ZKP. Remarkably, even consumer devices can directly join the network and create their own proofs peer-to-peer.
Memory-efficient proving enables proving on your device. Local proving is the only way to support applications that need privacy-preserving and local verifiable computation. And peer-to-peer proving allows for unprecedented prover cooperation at scale.
NovaNet is not an L1 or a traditional L2, as its primary goal is not to scale Ethereum. The smart contracts used for orchestration reside on Ethereum as a nimble smart contract.
However, there's no verifier lock-in. NovaNet verifiers operate multichain such as on Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, the Internet Computer Protocol, or even a traditional web2 server. Proof data can be sent anywhere developers desire. This offers unmatched flexibility and accessibility — a true modular ZKP layer.
Our funding will turbocharge development and bring advanced ZKP capabilities to a broader range of users. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Finality Capital and our other fantastic investors: Caballeros Capital, Steven Han (Sypher Capital), Andrew Ni (Whale Epic), Bill Tanyeri, Scott Moore, and JD (Jaynti Kanani).
Looking ahead, NovaNet is poised to redefine the landscape of ZKPs and their applications. By democratizing access to advanced ZKP technology and enabling its use across various domains, we're unlocking new possibilities for privacy, verifiable compute, and innovation. Our team is dedicated to delivering a robust and user-friendly platform that empowers developers and businesses to harness the full potential of ZKPs.
Stay tuned for more exciting updates from NovaNet as we continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with zero knowledge proofs!
Wyatt Benno and Houman Shadab, Cofounders
