Rakurai Secures $3 Million Seed Funding to Revolutionize Solana Staking with High-Throughput Nodes

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 13, 2025 – Rakurai, an innovative infrastructure project focused on enhancing the Solana blockchain through high-performance validator nodes, today announced the successful completion of a $3 million seed funding round. The investment, led by Anagram Ventures, will fuel the accelerated rollout of Rakurai's staking platform, designed to deliver supercharged yield and superior transaction throughput on the Solana network.

The funding round also saw strong participation from Colosseum, Slow Ventures, Robot Ventures, Crypto.com, P2P.org, GlobalStake, and Cyber Fund, demonstrating significant confidence in Rakurai's vision and potential to address critical challenges within the Solana ecosystem.

Addressing Solana's Bottlenecks

Rakurai's core mission is to optimize transaction scheduling and block creation on Solana, thereby increasing validator rewards and improving overall network performance. Standard benchmark testing indicates that Rakurai's platform can achieve up to 5x the transaction throughput (TPS) compared to existing Solana clients. This enhanced throughput, combined with high Quality of Service (QoS) transaction landing, enables both retail and institutional users to achieve unprecedented on-chain efficiency.

"One of the greatest challenges that Solana faces today is the frequency of conflicting transactions and scheduler bottlenecks, which have resulted in inefficiencies in block packing," said David Feiock, CIO of Anagram Ventures. "Rakurai's solution aims to tackle this issue by optimizing the process, allowing for more efficient block creation and ultimately increasing validator rewards. We think Rakurai will be a critical piece of the IBRL puzzle."

Technology and Innovation

Unlike most validators, Rakurai leverages proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimizations to significantly boost TPS. This allows Solana-based users, dApps, and bots to benefit from superior transaction landing and enhanced block rewards through transaction-dense blocks. Rakurai's accelerated Solana client aims to boost blockchain throughput while maintaining Web 3.0 security, decentralization, and neutrality at scale.

Leadership and Expertise

Rakurai is led by a team with over 20 years of experience in ASIC/SOC design, bringing profound expertise in building ultra-low-latency, high-throughput systems for algorithmic trading. CEO Ali Rizvi, an ex-Apple engineer, brings a wealth of experience to the project. Rakurai claimed the top spot in the Colosseum Renaissance hackathon’s infrastructure track, further validating its innovative approach.

"Today's funding news is one of many more milestones to come, as we build and deliver products that significantly increase TPS on Solana," said Ali Rizvi, CEO of Rakurai. "Rakurai has been able to accelerate Solana nodes through our unique innovations in transaction scheduling, which boost block rewards and benefit users, stakers, and node operators, enabling everyone to thrive on Solana."

Growth and Momentum

Rakurai has already established itself as one of Solana’s fastest-growing validators. Since epoch 732 (January 25-27, 2025), Rakurai’s network stake has increased by 390%, rising from approximately 17,960 $SOL to over 88,080 $SOL.

Future Plans

The seed funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand partnerships, and further enhance the Rakurai platform. Rizvi has hinted that more critical announcements are on the horizon.

About Rakurai

Rakurai is an infrastructure project focused on enhancing Solana’s transaction throughput by developing high-performance validator nodes. Utilizing proprietary scheduling and pipeline optimizations, Rakurai’s accelerated Solana client achieves approximately five times the transaction capacity compared to standard implementations. The platform aims to boost blockchain throughput while maintaining Web 3.0 security, decentralization, and neutrality at scale. Rakurai builds transaction-dense blocks providing users, dApps and bots superior transaction landing when they use the platform and also enhances yield for stakers through sharing of block rewards. Node operators can access higher block rewards and deliver higher yields by quickly deploying the Rakurai client. Stakers can access this yield by staking with any Rakurai node or leveraging Rakurai's Liquid Staking Pool (raiSOL).

For more information, visit rakurai.io and follow Rakurai on X (formerly Twitter) @Rakurai_io.