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Birdai Labs, a company that measures, verifies, and improves how trades execute on high-performance blockchains, has raised a $4 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures. Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept also participated. The funding will pay for senior engineering hires and extend the company's infrastructure at the base of the chain.
The company was founded and self-funded by Kevin Farrelly and Greg Scanlon, who built its initial infrastructure before raising outside capital. Farrelly previously founded Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning credit company that Franklin Templeton acquired in 2018, and spent seven years building Franklin Templeton's blockchain venture programs. Scanlon, a former Citadel senior quantitative trader, joined Farrelly at Franklin Templeton to build that venture practice and built Birdai Labs' core technology. Both spent years running due diligence on hundreds of early-stage blockchain companies for one of the industry's largest traditional finance firms. James McClain, a quantitative hedge fund veteran with a PhD from Princeton, recently joined as founding quantitative researcher.
Birdai Labs targets a problem that most onchain infrastructure ignores: the gap between when a trade order is placed and when it fills, where value can leak with no standard to measure or recover it. The company operates its own infrastructure at the base layer of the chains it monitors, giving it visibility into how transactions are timed, sequenced, and propagated rather than only what settled, the view public APIs provide. That base-layer access lets Birdai Labs verify any execution improvement against the chain itself.
The raise arrives as the fastest blockchains move toward multi-proposer architectures, a shift that fragments control over transaction ordering across multiple parties instead of a single block builder. That fragmentation makes measuring and enforcing execution quality harder and, according to Birdai Labs, positions it as the next competitive battleground among high-performance chains.
“For onchain markets to win institutional capital at scale, the cost of liquidity in DeFi has to be at least as good as it is in traditional finance, and provably so,” said Kevin Farrelly, co-founder and CEO of Birdai Labs. “Too often it isn’t, because value leaks in execution with no standard to hold it to.”
Matt Walsh, a founding partner at Castle Island Ventures, framed the investment around stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. “As stablecoin and real-world-asset tokenization become a clear killer app for public blockchains, Birdai Labs is building critical infrastructure that will add trust and accelerate this market,” he said.
Birdai Labs, Inc. was founded in 2025 and is based in San Francisco.
