Pi Squared, Building 'Universal ZK Circuit', Raises $12.5M

Pi Squared, a company setting out to enable verifiable computing through the use of zero-knowledge technology, announced Tuesday that it raised $12.5 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital.

Participation in the round included ABCDE, Bloccelerate, Generative Ventures, Robot Ventures and Samsung Next, as well as angel investors including the Ethereum Foundation's Justin Drake and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kanaan.

The fresh round of capital will be used to expand on the products the company plans on launching.

Pi Squared’s first product is its “Universal Settlement Layer,” which settles blockchain transactions – or as they call them, “claims” – in any programming language, Grigore Rosu, CEO of Pi Squared, said in an interview with CoinDesk.

Rosu is a professor in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the idea for Pi Squared came out of his career in academia.

“I've done this research with my students over many, many years,” Rosu told CoinDesk.

The company is also building a “Universal ZK Circuit,” which uses zero-knowledge technology to enable “trustless remote computing, AI and interoperable smart contract for any blockchain or dApp,” Pi Squared wrote in a press release.

“This will be made possible through the creation of a universal and disarmingly small ZK circuit that checks the integrity of mathematical proofs, which will provide verifiable-computing correctness guarantees to all languages and virtual machines (VMs) alike directly from their formal semantics, without any translation to a common language, VM or instruction set architecture (ISA),” according to the company.

Pi Squared is still in its proof-of-concept phase. Rosu said the project should be in testnet by the end of 2024.