Announcing Axiom's $20 Million Series A Round

Today, we're excited to announce our latest milestone at Axiom: we've raised $20 million in funding led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto. This funding will help us grow our team and accelerate development of our core ZK platform empowering smart contract developers to build data-rich, on-chain applications. 

The Round

In addition to Standard Crypto and Paradigm, we're thankful to be backed by funds including Robot Ventures and Ethereal Ventures as well as some amazing builders from across ZK and crypto: Hasu from Flashbots, Sandy, Ye and Haichen from Scroll, Alex from OpenSea, Sreeram and Calvin from EigenLabs, Liam from Optimism / ETH Global, Collin from Obol, Lakshman from Personae, Stephen and Jazzy from Zellic, Brendan and Daniel from Polygon, Zac and Joe from Aztec, and many others!

Why Axiom?

Smart contracts today operate in a data-starved environment. Reading and writing data is the most expensive operation for smart contracts, making applications reliant on large amounts of data prohibitively expensive or impossible to run on-chain.

On-chain applications have adapted to the exorbitant cost of data by removing features or carefully crafting contracts to optimize data usage. The result is that developers cannot leverage data at scale and are forced to architect their smart contracts in unwieldy ways. 

This means basic features like on-chain voting for governance must be baked into token contracts from inception. Others like referral codes for user acquisition increase gas costs enough to only be viable on-chain for the highest dollar use cases.

The core of these developer and user experience issues is the high price of authenticated data. On-chain applications need cheaper data access!

Our Vision

Axiom introduces a new approach to authenticated data access which uses ZK cryptography instead of consensus. By using ZK, Axiom allows on-chain applications to compute over more data at a lower cost, starting with the entire history of Ethereum in our recent Axiom V2 mainnet release. This enables developers to:

• Incorporate past transaction activity trustlessly in their on-chain applications
• Permissionlessly compose with other smart contracts
• Add modular pieces to on-chain applications without modifying existing deployed business logic

We believe the demand to store, access, and operate over authenticated data will only grow over time and that cryptography and blockchains are the correct tools to serve this demand. At Axiom, we're excited to continue enabling developers to build data-rich user experiences on-chain without compromising the trust-minimized guarantees that brought them to blockchains in the first place.

If you are a developer looking to incorporate richer data in your on-chain application, try out the Axiom SDK live on mainnet today or reach out to chat about your use case. If you share our belief in a world of richer and more expressive on-chain applications powered by ZK, we are hiring!

We have some exciting things in the works for on-chain developers in the coming weeks and months. To stay updated, follow us on Twitter –  we're looking forward to sharing more soon.

Onward!

Yi and Jonathan