Octane, a new cybersecurity startup dedicated to categorizing and protecting smart contracts, closed a successful seed funding round just last week. Archetype and Winklevoss Capital spearheaded this phenomenal financial accomplishment. The company intends to use the new capital to expedite product development, boost hiring, and scale-label vulnerability data.
Founded by Giovanni Vignone, previously a founding blockchain engineer at Mural, Octane offers developers a platform to battle-test their smart contract code with AI-powered security testing before deployment on the blockchain. This proactive approach supports developers to eliminate vulnerabilities and fortify the security of blockchain applications from the outset.
A number of prominent investors joined the funding round, among them former U.S. Of these investors, Gemini, Circle, Legion Capital, Druid Ventures, and Duke Capital Partners stood out. Angel investors Balaji Srinivasan and Sina Habibian participated in the round.
Octane’s foundational technology is an AI engine that constantly scans codebases. This protects the developer and delivers proactive threat detection and one-click remediation across the entire developer lifecycle. This AI-driven approach takes crypto security far beyond the limited realm of traditional audits.
“By leveraging LLMs to identify attack surfaces before deployment, we believe Octane expands the crypto security purview beyond traditional audits and does so with a developer-first mentality,” - Ash Egan
“Securing smart contracts on the blockchain is one of the biggest challenges facing any crypto developer,” - Tyler Winklevoss
“The importance of making crypto applications more secure is obvious and Gio and his world-class team have built just the platform to meet this need and help crypto devs and crypto companies ship more secure code,” - Cameron Winklevoss
Vignone played a key role in telling the story around the vital importance of strong smart contract security in the, unfortunately, ever-growing wake of threats.
“Flawed blockchain code enables billions in theft across crypto, with vulnerable smart contracts creating an ever-expanding attack surface as more value enters the ecosystem,” - Giovanni Vignone
