PomegraUS startup Soda Labs has closed a $3M seed round led by NextBlock to build privacy infrastructure for public blockchains, with the money going to chain expansion and bank integrations.
Key Takeaways
- Soda Labs raised a $3M seed round on October 8, 2026, with NextBlock as the lead investor.
- No other investors or valuation were disclosed, and NextBlock funded the entire round.
- The funds back Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic privacy coprocessor live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and COTI.
Lead
Soda Labs, a startup building programmable privacy for public blockchains, announced a $3M seed round on October 8, 2026. NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture firm, supplied the full amount. The company did not disclose a valuation or name any co-investors.
The capital will pay for go-to-market work, growth of the validator network, wider blockchain coverage, hiring, and integrations with banks and fintech providers. It is a small round for infrastructure that must convince regulated institutions to trust it. The pitch rests on production numbers rather than a roadmap.
What Does Soda Labs Actually Build?
Soda Labs builds cryptographic tooling that keeps transaction data private on public chains while allowing selective disclosure. Its core technology, called GC-MPC, combines garbled circuits with multiparty computation. It relies on established primitives such as AES and SHA-256 and runs on standard cloud CPUs, so it needs no specialized hardware.
The flagship product is Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor for programmable privacy. Bubble is live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and COTI, and a Solana expansion is under way. Chief executive Avishay Yanai, a cryptography PhD, co-founded the company with chief technology officer Meital Levy, who holds a PhD in algorithms.
Yanai said Bubble gives banks, payment companies and tokenization platforms privacy with controlled disclosure on the chains they already use. The stated customer base is regulated finance, not retail users seeking anonymity.
What Has the Technology Already Processed?
The company says its technology has processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network. It supports the tokenization platform Zoniqx and the perpetuals exchange PriveX, which Soda Labs says has reached more than $20 billion in trading volume.
Soda Labs also makes comparative performance claims. It reports 5x to 10x gains in transaction lifecycle benchmarks, 10x to 100x higher throughput and 100x to 1,000x lower costs than alternative approaches. These figures come from the company and have not been independently verified. The baselines behind them were not specified.
Why Does a $3M Seed Round Matter for Blockchain Privacy?
The round matters because it points to institutional demand for privacy that does not break compliance. Public blockchains expose balances and counterparties by default, which is a practical obstacle for banks moving tokenized assets or payments on-chain. Controlled disclosure, where data stays hidden but can be revealed to auditors or regulators, is the feature that regulated firms ask for.
The amount is modest next to the capital typically raised by zero-knowledge and secure-computation rivals. That gap cuts two ways. A lean round suggests the company is betting on existing traction, and the sole-investor structure means one backer carries the whole bet. A single-investor seed also gives little signal about wider market appetite, since no second firm validated the terms.
How Does Soda Labs Compare With Other Privacy Approaches?
Competing approaches include zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments and fully homomorphic encryption. Each trades off speed, cost and trust assumptions differently. Soda Labs argues that garbled circuits paired with multiparty computation sit at a better point on that curve, mainly because they run on ordinary cloud hardware.
The skeptical reading is that the headline multiples depend heavily on the benchmark chosen. The counterargument is the transaction count on COTI, which shows the system works at scale in at least one live deployment. Whether the same results hold on Ethereum mainnet-adjacent chains, where fees and congestion differ, is the open question.
What Comes Next for Soda Labs?
Near-term milestones are visible: the Solana launch, more validators, and the first named bank or fintech integrations. Those integrations will test whether the controlled-disclosure model satisfies compliance teams, which move more slowly than crypto-native users.
A follow-on round with additional investors would be the clearest sign that the seed thesis is holding. Without named institutional customers, the $20 billion trading figure remains tied to a single exchange on a single network.
Outlook
Soda Labs enters the next phase with $3M, a live multi-chain product and usage figures concentrated on COTI. The company must now convert that traction into regulated-finance contracts across a broader set of chains. Its undisclosed valuation and single-investor cap table leave market validation for the next raise.