Our Story

How We Started

RISC Zero was started in 2021 to tackle the biggest challenge to our industry, and potentially our society – increased centralization and consolidation of not just the applications we use but the infrastructure we use to build and manage them.

Our Purpose

RISC Zero is bringing general purpose computing to the zero-knowledge ecosystem – enabling users to trust programs run anywhere while allowing developers to use the tools they already know and love.

What We Do

We're a diverse group of hackers, futurists and nerds dedicated to making the internet the place we all deserve. We've already built the world's first zkVM which can run arbitrary code as a zero-knowledge proof, and now we're building an ecosystem on top of it. Join us.

Made up of team members previously at

Amazon

Chainsafe

Coinbase

Google

Intel

Meta

Microsoft

Mina Foundation

O(1) Labs

Ripple

SoFi

Uber

Interested in joining the team?

See Open Roles

Our Journey

2019

Co-founder Jeremy Bruestle starts implementing zero-knowledge proofs and experimenting with recursion

2020

Co-founders Jeremy Bruestle, Brian Retford and Frank Laub decide to develop a general purpose zkVM, a circuit that implements the RISC-V ISA

2021

October

RISC Zero is founded

2022

April

zkVM V0.1 is released to enable writing a ZK application without building a circuit or writing custom code
August

$12M Seed Round

2023

May

zkVM V0.15 upgrade, enabling continuations and other features
July

$40M Series A Round
August

Bonsai proving service is released

Zeth open-source ZK block prover for Ethereum is released
October

Partnerships with Optimism, AltLayer
November

Bonsai Pay demo is released

2024

February

zkVM V0.20 upgrade, enabling proof composition and unlocking use cases for designing applications with multiple parties

Leadership

Jeremy Bruestle

Co-Founder
CEO

Frank Laub

Co-Founder
CTO

Manasi Vora

VP Product Growth

Tim Carstens

Principal Engineer

Brett Carter

VP of Product

Shiv Shankar

VP of Engineering

Kevin Nassery

Head of Security

Claire Kart

Head of Marketing

Joe Restivo

SVP of Operations

Nicole Doyle

VP of People Ops

Investors