Announcing Our Investment in Birdai Labs: Building the Execution Standard for Institutional Flows on Public Blockchains

We're excited to announce our investment in Birdai's $4 million seed round alongside Castle Island Ventures and The Venture Dept. Founded by Kevin Farrelly and Greg Scanlon, Birdai is building execution infrastructure for institutional flows on high-throughput public blockchains - both the tools to measure how transactions actually execute today and the systems designed to make them better.

Onchain markets have a structural problem hiding in plain sight: value is extracted from the very transactions that create it, in the gap between an order and its fill. Every trade routed through a public blockchain is exposed to sequencing, timing, and propagation dynamics that most participants cannot see, let alone measure. There is no standard for execution quality onchain, no way to prove whether a fill was fair, and no mechanism to return leaked value to the people who generated it.

Traditional markets solved a version of this problem more than two decades ago. Institutional capital market participants can operate at scale because execution quality is measurable and enforceable. One example of this is through the National Market System, which mandates order routing based on the best available price and fair access fees. We have a firm belief that before regulated institutions participate in onchain digital asset markets at scale, they will require fairness, transparency, and provable execution quality. Today, no such standard exists.

That gap is about to be tested. Institutional flows are increasingly moving onto public blockchains - stablecoins, tokenized assets, and the trading activity around them. At the same time, the industry's fastest blockchains are converging on multi-proposer architectures, splitting control over transaction ordering across many independent actors instead of one. As those flows grow and the onchain transaction supply chain gets more complex, execution outcomes will diverge - and better execution becomes something chains and applications compete on. Protocols need to know where value is leaking, applications and developers need to prove execution outcomes, and institutions need infrastructure they can hold to a standard.

One of the reasons we're most excited about Birdai is that the company is built on a foundation of proprietary execution data. Rather than starting with a theoretical view of market structure, Kevin and Greg have been building the infrastructure to observe how transactions actually execute across public blockchains. By reconstructing millions of transactions, Birdai has developed a unique dataset that powers its ability to measure execution quality, identify where value leaks from trades, and build new products designed to improve outcomes. As more transaction flow passes through the platform, that data advantage continues to strengthen.

The other reason is the team. Kevin Farrelly previously founded Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning powered credit underwriting company acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2018, where he then spent seven years building the firm's blockchain venture fund and strategy. Couple that with Greg Scanlon - a former Senior Quantitative Trader at Citadel who joined Kevin at Franklin Templeton before building Birdai's core technology - and you get a rare pairing of market-structure literacy and base-layer engineering fluency. Both spent years inside some of the world's largest financial institutions, seeing this market from the builder's chair and the allocator's seat, and they know firsthand what market participants demand.

We believe institutional flows will define the next phase of onchain markets, and that the execution infrastructure which makes public blockspace measurable, verifiable, and fair will be among the most important infrastructure developments of this cycle. We're thrilled to back Kevin, Greg, and the entire Birdai team on this journey.