Peter Thiel's Founders Fund leads $13.2 million seed round in cryptography startup Lagrange Labs

Lagrange Labs, a startup building out the cryptography protocol Lagrange, raised $13.2 million in seed funding. Peter Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund led the round, which saw additional support from Archetype Ventures, 1kx, Maven11, Fenbushi Capital, Volt Capital, CMT Digital and Mantle Ecosystem Fund. 

Lagrange develops infrastructure that scales big data for cross-chain interoperability. The firm intends to use the financing to build out its ZK Coprocessor, a form of blockchain technology that scales the computation and datasets available to decentralized application developers. Use cases for the ZK Coprocessor include on-chain liquidity or running artificial intelligence or machine learning models, according to a company statement. Lagrange Labs intends to launch the ZK Coprocessor on mainnet sometime in 2024.

"Lagrange’s ZK Coprocessor takes a unique approach by first pre-processesing blockchain data into a SNARK optimized data structure, utilizing a decentralized network of provers," the project said in a release. "Once pre-processed, Lagrange’s network of provers can prove large scale SQL queries over the ZK-friendly data at a low cost to users. As our coprocessor is naturally parallelizable, proving can horizontally scale across arbitrary numbers of operators through both parallel computation and parallel proof generation."

Lagrange incorporated support for the Ethereum liquid restaking protocol EigenLayer, as well Mantle, Base, Frax, Polymer, LayerZero, Omni and AltLayer. 

In May of last year, Lagrange Labs raised $4 million in pre-seed funding led by the crypto investment firm 1kx, with further support form Maven11, Lattice Fund, CMT Digital and Daedalus Angels, CoinDesk previously reported.