News
Jiritsu today announced at $10.2M funding round led by gumi Cryptos Capital and joined by Republic, Susquehanna (SIG), Comma3, Kestrel, Eterna, Polymorphic, Shima, and Tokentus. As with many of our recently announced investments from gumi Cryptos Capital Fund II, we continue to lead more often than we follow. As always, we continue to be high conviction, early stage investment partners to some of the best entrepreneurs in the industry.
Thesis
Jiritsu was not originally a Real World Assets (RWA) thesis investment, rather it was an investment focused on the potential for off-chain compute verification. We broadly believe that the computing as a whole over time will stratify into three distinct layers–firstly that the on-chain compute layer will represent the most trusted and potentially decentralized (but also the most expensive) layer of computation. The outermost layer of computation is what we see today in systems like Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is essentially unverified compute. The third category in which we place Jiritsu is verified off-chain computing. We believe increasingly more and more compute will be verified off-chain compute, and that over time, the majority of computation will be verified in one form or another. One of the foundational and largest problems facing our institutions continues to be the inability to scale trust, and the ability to perform many different forms of verification proofs over computation will enable our world to become more trustworthy, deterministic and fair.
As we’ll make clear below, the thesis was also inseparable from the team as with many early stage investment opportunities–in this case, our thesis was that this experienced team would act as a “heat-seeking missle” to find product-market fit for compute verification, which they indeed did by solving a very large problem in the domain of RWA.
Team
Jacob Guedalia is an inspirational leader for this mission. He combines vast ambition with very pragmatic ambition and decades of venture-backed startup experience having been backed by some of the most reputable Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms like NEA and Khosla Ventures and having sold one of his startups to Qualcomm. What impressed us most was the deep pragmatism that Jacob expressed in his pursuit of his technology innovation. Many technologists get dazzled by new horizontal technologies, but fail to see the valuable commercial applications and are unable to “cross the chasm” to solve the everyday problems of real users.
The Product
Partners such as Republic who have over 2.5 million users who have undergone KYC (Know-Your-Customer) onboarding procedures and Susquehanna, a powerhouse from the traditional finance world, allows Jiritsu to quickly deploy product and immediately begin verifying assets and attestations, having already delivered over 4 million proofs and counting.
Disclaimer
Information is provided for general educational purposes only. This presentation is not an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of offers to buy securities. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment or other advice nor is it to be relied on in making an investment decision. For more important information, please see disclaimer
