Rakurai, the infrastructure project supercharging Solana staking, has closed a $3 million seed funding round led by Anagram Ventures. Other investors in this round include Colosseum, Slow Ventures, Robot Ventures and Crypto.com. P2P.org, GlobalStake and Cyber Fund also participated, highlighting Rakurai’s potential to drive significant advancements in decentralized infrastructure.
Today’s funding will advance the rollout of Rakurai’s high-yield Solana staking platform, offering high QoS (quality of service) transaction landing through increased efficiencies to retail and institutional participants alike. In standard benchmark tests, Rakurai nodes deliver 5x the TPS (transactions per second) compared to the standard Solana client. The investment will also fuel product development and partnership growth.
Ali Rizvi, CEO of Rakurai, said: “Today’s funding news is one of many more milestones to come, as we build and deliver products that significantly increase TPS on Solana. Rakurai has been able to accelerate Solana nodes through our unique innovations in transaction scheduling, which boost block rewards and benefit users, stakers and node operators, enabling everyone to thrive on Solana.”
Founded by a team with extensive expertise in building ultra-low-latency, high throughput systems for algorithmic trading, Rakurai is led by ex-Apple, Silicon Valley engineer Ali Rizvi, who has more than 20 years of experience and a background in ASIC/SOC design. In last year’s Colosseum Solana Renaissance Hackathon, Rakurai won the top prize in the infrastructure track.
David Feiock, CIO at Anagram Ventures said: “One of the greatest challenges that Solana faces today is the frequency of conflicting transactions and scheduler bottlenecks, which have resulted in inefficiencies in block packing. Rakurai’s solution aims to tackle this issue by optimizing the process, allowing for more efficient block creation and ultimately increasing validator rewards. We think Rakurai will be a critical piece of the IBRL puzzle”
About Rakurai
Rakurai is a trusted validator that boosts TPS with proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimizations. Operating on the Solana network, Rakurai builds transaction-dense blocks providing users, dApps and bots superior transaction landing when they use the platform and also enhances yield for stakers through sharing of block rewards. Node operators can access higher block rewards and deliver higher yields by quickly deploying the Rakurai client. Stakers can access this yield by staking with any Rakurai node or leveraging Rakurai’s Liquid Staking Pool (raiSOL). For more information, see rakurai.io.