Israeli startup Blockaid, a Web3 security company, has raised a $27 million Series A led by Ribbit Capital and Variant. The round also included participation from Cyberstarts, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. Blockaid previously raised a $6 million Seed round and took its total funding to date to $33 million.
“The truth is that today web3 is broken. Fund loss per capita exceeds any other industry — a whopping $14B was stolen last year alone, twice as much as the $7B in direct losses from all non-crypto cybercrime. What’s more, one in ten dApps that people interact with are malicious, so savvy, crypto-native users also fall prey to bad actors,” co-founder and CEO Ido Ben-Natan wrote on the company’s website.
“Threats don’t just come from your average attacker, there are nation states who actively steal user funds to generate a significant portion of their GDP. How are everyday users of web3 supposed to navigate such an adversarial and uncertain environment? For web3 to reach its potential, it needs to be easier to use and harder to get scammed. Blockaid solves the existential usability issue by providing the security tools needed for web3 builders.”
Blockaid was founded by Ben-Natan and CTO Raz Niv who met during their military service in Unit 8200. They went on to work as Cyber Security R&D Team Leads at the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel, winning the prestigious Israel Defense Prize.
“After over six years of managing teams and cyber operations, we founded Blockaid, hiring out a team of 20+ of the best security engineers Israeli cyber intelligence has to offer,” Ben-Natan added. “Our unique architecture ingests vast amounts of data collected from scanning, simulating, and validating dApps and transactions across the web. The more transactions and dApps Blockaid sees, the more our models improve.”
Blockaid customers include the likes of MetaMask, OpenSea, Rainbow, and Zerion. The company said that over the past six months it has scanned over 450 million transactions, prevented 1.2 million malicious transactions, and secured over $500 million of user funds that could have been compromised.
