At Bain Capital Crypto, research and investing are interlocked. Researching foundational problems has led to our most successful investments. Working with builders has inspired our most fruitful research directions. Researchers and investors participate equally in every decision we make.

Tight integration requires an unusual amount of focus. We make atypically few investments. When we find an opportunity we like, we concentrate, often leading multiple consecutive rounds. Our research is similarly concentrated in a small number of areas where we believe new results will have a transformational impact on the industry. As with investing, when we think we’re onto something, we redouble our efforts.

We’ve been investing in ZK and advanced cryptography for a few years. We were lucky to invest in Scroll in 2021, Risc Zero and Irreducible in 2022, and Worldcoin in 2023. Our research into new frameworks and results in the field is more recent but is ramping up quickly. While our original thesis was narrowly focused on scaling blockchains and certain early privacy applications, our conviction has grown. Today, we’re tripling down.

We’re excited to welcome five exceptional researchers to the BCC team to expand our focus into advanced cryptography. Kobi Gurkan is joining BCC as an investing partner and head of research. Wei Jie Koh and Andrija Novakovic are joining BCC as researchers. Nico Mohnblatt and grjte are joining as research collaborators.

Kobi was a co-founder of Geometry and the founder of Geometry Research. He was a cryptography lead at Celo and a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. You can find his fingerprints in many of the most popular advanced cryptography libraries and tools. 

Kobi has a knack for identifying and supporting talented builders. He’s been prescient in surfacing early-stage projects as an investor, often believing in teams before anyone else. In our shared portfolio, Kobi and his partners at Geometry invested in projects such as Risc Zero and Scroll before BCC. It’s been a pleasure to partner with Kobi on those investments. Kobi has helped some of the best people in our industry get their start and mentored them through their careers. We’re delighted to have some of those folks join our team alongside him.

Wei Jie was an engineer at Consensys and a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation prior to joining Kobi at Geometry. He was one of the lead developers of MACI, a bribery-resistant quadratic voting system, and has done trailblazing work in client-side ZK proving.

Andrija was a researcher at Geometry and the Ethereum Foundation. He’s worked on Semaphore, a privacy gadget for ZK set membership proofs, and has published work on radically reducing costs for proving pairings and developing scalable private sealed-bid auctions.

Nico joined Geometry in 2022 and has quickly become prolific in the ZK community, co-hosting the Zero Knowledge Podcast and ZK Whiteboard Sessions. He’s known for his work on folding schemes, including Sangria, the first folding scheme for arithmetizations beyond R1CS.

grjte ran web2 businesses as a CEO and CTO before entering ZK through ZKHack. Within 6 months of entering the space she was the engineering lead at Polygon Miden building the Miden zkVM and the AirScript DSL before joining Geometry Research.

This group has already contributed meaningfully to the BCC portfolio. Nico has worked with Risc Zero to rigorously analyze security in their proof system. Andrija, Kobi and Wei Jie have made major contributions to Semaphore, which is one of the foundational components of Worldcoin. Andrija worked on integrating MVLookup into Scroll’s zkEVM. The whole group recently developed o1js-blobstream, bringing Celestia DA to Mina.

Like our best work at BCC, these contributions have been the result of researchers following their genuine curiosity. At BCC, our interest in resource pricing as a path to scaling blockchains originated from our work with Celestia, Fuel and Scroll. Our work on routing and CFMMs originated from investing work I was doing at Placeholder and work Guillermo and Tarun Chitra were doing at Gauntlet. We find this integrated approach to research and investing to be deeply rewarding. In the time we’ve spent together, it’s been clear that Kobi, Andrija, Nico, Wei Jie, and grjte share that ethos.

In expanding our team, we are betting that the blockchain industry will wholesale re-architect around ZK and advanced cryptography. Advanced cryptographic systems are improving rapidly and are becoming broadly usable. Meanwhile, the AI race is breaking the modern internet to the point where, in a few years, nothing we see online will be trusted. As programmable cryptography commoditizes and unverifiable infrastructure strains, we believe this an exciting time to be investing in verifiable services and applications.

To invest and partner well, our approach is to research and build at the frontiers. Kobi, Wei Jie, Andrija, grjte, and Nico significantly uplevel BCC’s ability to do that. We’re thrilled to welcome them to our team.