Eli Ben-Sasson: STARKs Inventor, StarkWare Founder
StarkWare co-founder/president. Technion CS professor. Invented STARK zero-knowledge proofs. $8B valuation. The mathematician behind the most-deployed ZK scaling infrastructure on Ethereum.
Eli Ben-Sasson is the co-founder and president of StarkWare Industries — the Israeli cryptography company that invented STARK zero-knowledge proof systems and turned them into production-grade blockchain scaling infrastructure. Professor of Computer Science at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.
Ben-Sasson's academic work on probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs) and interactive oracle proofs laid the theoretical foundation for what became STARKs — Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge. He co-authored the foundational STARK paper with Alessandro Chiesa, and co-founded StarkWare in 2018 with Uri Kolodny (CEO), Michael Riabzev, and Chiesa.
From Technion Cryptography to the Most-Deployed ZK Infrastructure on Ethereum
StarkWare's technology powers StarkNet (a permissionless Layer 2 network) and StarkEx (a permissioned scaling engine used by dYdX, Immutable X, Sorare, and others). The company reached a valuation of $8 billion in a 2022 Series D led by Greenoaks Capital, with investors including Paradigm, Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Vitalik Buterin personally.
The STARK proof system is distinguished from competing ZK approaches (SNARKs) by being transparent — no trusted setup ceremony required — and quantum-resistant. Ben-Sasson's academic credibility and the Technion institutional pedigree give StarkWare a scientific legitimacy that most crypto infrastructure companies lack.
Where Ben-Sasson Sits in the Israeli Crypto Builder Cohort
Ben-Sasson is the mathematician of the Israeli crypto tier. Shaulov (Fireblocks) built custody infrastructure. Assia (eToro) built consumer trading. Ben-Sasson built the cryptographic primitives that the entire ZK-rollup category runs on. His contribution is foundational — closer to academic invention than startup building, but commercialized through StarkWare at a scale that makes the distinction irrelevant.
The Technion-to-crypto pipeline Ben-Sasson represents is small but significant: Israeli academic cryptographers turning theoretical computer science into deployable blockchain infrastructure. It mirrors the Hebrew University-to-Mobileye pipeline Amnon Shashua built in computer vision.
