最新报道：According to Bijie.com, cryptocurrency startup Raiku has raised $13.5 million to build infrastructure that it claims will make Solana transactions predictable and "guaranteed," addressing one of the biggest challenges facing blockchain networks under high demand. The funding round includes an $11.25 million seed round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Jump Crypto, Lightspeed Faction, HashKey Capital, and others; and a $2.25 million pre-seed round co-led by Figment Capital and Big Brain Holdings, with support from Reciprocal Ventures and Anagram. Prominent angel investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Austin Federa, Kash Dhanda, and Julien Bouteloup also participated. Raiku founder and CEO Robin Nordnes told The Block that its seed round began in March 2025 and closed last month; the pre-seed round began in April 2024 and closed in October. Nordnes stated that both funding rounds were structured as Simple Agreements for Future Equity (SAFEs) with tokenized warrants. He declined to comment on Raiku's post-investment valuation. Nordnes stated that while Solana is known for its speed, its reliability can plummet during periods of congestion, noting that Raiku aims to provide predictable and "guaranteed" transactions. "For institutions and advanced DeFi applications, speed isn't enough. They need determinism, the ability to predict when trades will land and run strategies with microsecond precision," Nordnes said. "We built Raiku to provide developers and validators with the infrastructure to guarantee this outcome." Nordnes explained that Raiku introduces a parallel execution layer that allows developers to pre-confirm transactions into Solana blocks. Its scheduling engine works with validators to reserve block space, enabling what's known as "guaranteed block inclusion." He stated that features like "Ahead of Time (AoT)" and "Just in Time (JiT)" reservations open up new strategies and dynamics for developers and institutions. Nordnes said the system uses high-performance edge computing located near the point where Solana transactions originate, achieving confirmation speeds of 30-50 milliseconds. He added that through Raiku's blockspace marketplace, developers and institutions can ensure reliable execution "even under extreme load." Nordnes pointed to use cases such as market makers ensuring order cancellations and replacements, oracle providers ensuring timely data updates, and node operators creating new revenue streams by selling predictable blockspace. Nordnes acknowledged competitors such as Jito's Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM), Paladin (incubated by bloXroute), and Temporal, with Jito BAM being the closest. But he said Raiku's approach is different. Nordnes said Jito BAM uses a trusted execution environment to run plugin-driven block builders, but this imposes restrictions on applications that don't opt in. He added that Raiku was written from the ground up in Rust for performance and flexibility, giving validators and developers freedom of choice rather than a one-size-fits-all system. As for its business model, Nordnes said Raiku expects the majority of its revenue to come from protocol-native fees, including priority lanes for transactions, the blockspace market, and commission rates for liquidity provision. He added that equity-linked revenue will come from validator operations and specialized RPC services tailored for builders. Nordnes said that Raiku began development in July 2024 and deployed the first version to the development network (devnet) in December of the same year, and is currently running smoothly. Its testnet is live, and validator partners include Kiln, Figment, Everstake, Chorus One, and Blockdaemon. Raiku v2 will be open to developers via an SDK and is expected to be released later this year, with the mainnet planned to go live in 2026. Nordnes said, "Solana cannot become the future of finance, computing, and information without infrastructure that service providers can rely on." Nihal Maunder, Partner at Pantera Capital, said, "Raiku fills one of the most critical gaps in blockchain infrastructure: predictable execution at scale. Their architecture provides real-world reliability and opens the door to the next generation of on-chain financial systems on Solana." Raiku currently has approximately 20 employees across Europe and Asia. The company does not offer board seats to any investors before the seed or pre-seed rounds. The Funding Newsletter: Subscribe to my free bimonthly The Funding Newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest cryptocurrency venture capital financing and M&A deals, news, and trends. Sign up now!