NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cubist Inc., a security-focused Web3 dev tools provider, today announced the close of its $7 million seed round. Cubist’s leadership includes a former fraud operations executive and computer security professors from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from venture capital and strategic investors including dao5, Amplify Partners, Polygon, Blizzard, Axelar, and more.
Despite incredible advances in Web3 technology, dApp developers are still forced to cobble together custom infrastructure from incompatible languages, protocols, and security solutions.
They spend long hours trying to make sense of low-level details of where and how their dApps will execute, creating an industry-wide drag on developer productivity. Worse, this status quo gives developers thousands of opportunities to make devastating mistakes.
Cubist makes Web3 development efficient, seamless, and safe. Through its modular set of security-focused dev tools, Cubist brings software engineering best practices to the entire lifecycle of a dApp—from Continuous Integration (CI) testing to push-button deployment backed by secure credential management. This secure-by-design tooling empowers developers to design the best applications without needing to navigate complex interfaces and infrastructure.
Cubist’s first offering is its newly released, open-source software development kit (SDK), the first SDK designed for multi- and cross-chain development and testing. Cubist’s SDK allows users to write cross-chain dApps as if they run on a single chain, and change chains or bridge providers with a single line of configuration. The team is also building enterprise security offerings.
“The future of Web3 will be powered by dApp developers building amazing applications. However, this future will not be possible if developers must continue to build custom tooling and infrastructure, stitch together incompatible point solutions, and lose sleep over the security of their tech stacks. This stifles innovation and leads to serious security vulnerabilities,” said Riad Wahby, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cubist. “We’re building Cubist to break this bottleneck and let developers focus on delivering the best, most secure applications possible. Cubist’s obsessive focus on helping developers efficiently and securely build dApps will set the standards for both safety and productivity, and we can’t wait to help build the future of Web3.”
“Even some of the most exciting innovations in Web3 have suffered from technical mistakes that are easy to make, expensive to find, and hard to fix. The problem is that developers simply don’t have the tools they need to prevent these critical errors,” said Ann Stefan, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Cubist. “Cubist takes a security-first approach that gives developers peace of mind at every stage of development. With the support of our investors and community, we look forward to making Web3 a safe, fruitful place for builders.”
“Cubist is on an exciting growth trajectory, led by a team that is uniquely positioned to address today’s Web3 development and security challenges. By positioning themselves at the union between security, efficiency, and developer familiarity, Cubist is defining the next iteration of developer platforms to bring a better experience for all in Web3,” said Luke Pearson, Senior Research Cryptographer at Polychain Capital. “With Cubist, Web3 development will be faster, safer, and simpler. We are thrilled to support this incredible team.”
“We met Cubist early in their journey and were immediately compelled by what they were building. Our conviction has grown even stronger with their first-of-its-kind developer toolkit,” said Tekin Salimi, Founder of dao5. “Developers looking for first-class security and a unified multi-chain development environment should look no further than Cubist. We can’t wait to see what’s next for the Cubist team.”
“Web3 has the potential to be transformative—but many Web2 developers remain hesitant to dive in because they just don’t have the time to study every esoteric component of the Web3 tech stack. Cubist, backed by a world-class technical team, is raising the level of abstraction to eliminate this barrier,” said David Beyer, Partner at Amplify Partners. “I’m really excited for Cubist to unlock Web3 for the next wave of developers.”
Cubist’s team brings many decades of combined experience in retrofitting security for real-world systems like Web browsers and runtimes, and has collectively published over 80 research papers on computer systems, programming languages, security, and cryptography. Cubist’s team includes:
- Riad Wahby, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, who also serves as an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University;
- Ann Stefan, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer;
- Fraser Brown, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, who also serves as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University;
- Deian Stefan, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, who also serves as an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego;
- John Renner, PhD, Founding Engineer;
- Aleksandar Milicevic, PhD, Founding Engineer; and
- Andres Nötzli, PhD, Founding Engineer.
Cubist will use its seed funding to expand its team, accelerate its product development, and scale its technological capabilities. Those interested in joining the Cubist community can learn more at cubist.dev.
About Cubist
Cubist is a Web3 infrastructure provider creating secure-by-design tools that enable developers to safely build, test, and deploy dApps at scale. Cubist helps Web3 dApp engineers manage their development, testing, deployment, and upgrade workflows in custom, security-focused CI/CD pipelines. Cubist takes care of what’s tricky—and risky—from credential management to cross-chain bridge code generation. To learn more, visit cubist.dev.
