Birdai Labs, a developer of infrastructure that measures, verifies and improves how trades execute on high-performance blockchains, has secured $4m in seed funding.
The round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept also taking part. Proceeds will go towards recruiting senior engineers and building out the firm’s infrastructure at the base layer of the chain.
The raise arrives at a moment when the fastest blockchains are shifting towards multi-proposer architectures, a change that splinters control over how transactions are ordered and pushes execution quality to the forefront of competition.
According to the company, onchain markets suffer from value being siphoned away from traders in the gap between an order being placed and filled, with no benchmark to quantify the loss and no mechanism for recovering it.
Birdai Labs builds neutral market infrastructure for digital assets, aiming to enhance onchain execution and channel value back to the traders who generate it. Rather than relying on public APIs that only reveal what settled, the firm runs its own base-layer infrastructure, giving it a ground-truth picture of how transactions are timed, sequenced and propagated and any improvements it delivers can be verified directly against the chain.
The company was founded and initially self-funded by Kevin Farrelly and Greg Scanlon, who built its early technology before seeking external backing. Farrelly previously established Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning credit business acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2018, where he went on to spend seven years developing blockchain venture programmes. Scanlon, a former senior quantitative trader at Citadel, joined Farrelly at Franklin Templeton before engineering Birdai Labs’ core technology.
Birdai Labs co-founder and CEO Kevin Farrelly said, “For onchain markets to win institutional capital at scale, the cost of liquidity in DeFi has to be at least as good as it is in traditional finance, and provably so. Too often it isn’t, because value leaks in execution with no standard to hold it to. Closing that gap takes excellence across many layers of execution, and it sits at the core of what we build.”
Castle Island Ventures founding partner Matt Walsh said, “As stablecoin and real-world-asset tokenization become a clear killer app for public blockchains, Birdai Labs is building critical infrastructure that will add trust and accelerate this market. Kevin and Greg pair institutional market-structure fluency with base-layer engineering, and that combination is perfect founder-market fit.”
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