RiskLayer has closed its Builders round, a pre-seed funding round of an undisclosed amount. The round was co-led by global venture capital firms Antler and Momentum6, with additional backing from Wagmi Ventures, Hypotenuse Ventures, and a roster of notable angel investors including Richard Ma (Founder, Zircuit), Ishaan Hiranandani (Strategy Lead, Eigenlayer), Agnish Ghosh (Core, EthNimbus), Alex (Core Contributor, FranklinDAO), and Paul Taylor (Ex-Blackrock).
RiskLayer, developed by Chainrisk Labs, is an economic risk management protocol that has already made significant inroads by serving notable DeFi protocols such as Compound, Angle Labs, Gyroscope, Ebisu Finance, and ecosystems including Arbitrum and Fuel Network. The firm is now leveraging Actively Validated Services (AVS) on EigenLayer to address critical economic security concerns in DeFi, positioning itself to seize substantial institutional opportunities in the crypto space.
The company’s innovative approach involves the deployment of two distinct AVSs: the Risk Oracle AVS, which serves as a comprehensive data provider for DeFi risk, and the Risk Rollup AVS, which caters to application-specific needs on EigenLayer.
The Risk Oracle AVS utilizes a “proof of risk” consensus to index user risk across different markets and assets, enabling investors to deploy capital with optimized risk efficiency. The Risk Rollup AVS aims to secure application-specific rollups on RiskLayer, fostering the development of new structured financial products that are inherently risk-aware.
Sudipan Sinha, Core Contributor at RiskLayer and CEO at Chainrisk Labs, highlighted the importance of scaling economic security from the protocol level to the application layer, making risk-optimized strategies more accessible and efficient for both institutions and DeFi users.
“Economic security is being solved at the network level by EigenLayer. At RiskLayer, we abstract economic security from the protocol layer and scale it to the application layer. Institutions and users in DeFi have always had a hard time figuring out risk-optimized strategies. RiskLayer is taking one step at a time to make that onboarding experience trustless and hyper-efficient,” Sinha said.
RiskLayer will use the funds to accelerate the development of its AVS infrastructure and gear up for its upcoming pre-staking launch.
Nitin Sharma, Partner and Global Co-lead for Web3 at Antler, expressed confidence in RiskLayer’s trajectory, citing the team’s depth of research and thought leadership in economic security. “We are very excited about the momentum Chainrisk Labs has built quickly, to emerge as one of the most promising Web3 projects globally, when it comes to economic security,” Sharma stated.
Nilotpal Mukherjee, Founder of Symbiote and General Partner at Momentum6, said: “The team has been razor-focused on navigating the complex space and solving the multi-billion dollar problem in Web3 economic security with their deep association with the Eigen ecosystem.”
