Soda Labs has closed a $3 million seed round funded entirely by NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture firm focused on cryptographic infrastructure. The company announced the raise on October 8, 2026, as part of its mission to build infrastructure that lets banks and payment firms move regulated money on public blockchains while preserving privacy for balances, amounts, and counterparties.
CEO Avishay Yanai said the capital “lets us take it from pilots to production.” NextBlock founder and general partner Pieter van Poecke noted that Soda Labs “already had a working product and paying customers,” crediting the team’s technical intellectual property and commercial instincts for the decision to go all in. NextBlock’s first Luxembourg alternative investment fund launched in July 2025 with $40 million in initial commitments.
The funds will support the transition from gcEVM to Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor that processes private workloads from multiple chains without exposing data to outside parties or to Soda itself. Private computations can be checked on the Bubble Validator Network. Bubble is currently active on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and Polygon, with non-EVM integration including Solana planned for a future date.
Bubble’s confidentiality layer is built on garbled-circuit multiparty computation (GC-MPC), performing calculations directly on encrypted data and splitting data across independent nodes so no single operator can read it. The approach runs on ordinary cloud CPUs and uses standard cryptography such as AES and SHA256. Soda Labs says Bubble provides confidentiality, not full anonymity: transaction amounts, token types, senders and receivers remain hidden from public view, while an authorized party can decrypt the data.
Performance figures listed on the Soda Labs website report 500 confidential transactions per second sustained on Arbitrum over 15,000 transfers in July 2026, at $0.14 per million transfers. The company says it has achieved a five- to tenfold improvement over its last full transaction lifecycle test and will publish updated numbers in the coming weeks. Its stack is audited by Hacken and covered by three granted US patents.
Soda Labs’ garbled-circuit technology has been live since March 2025, powering privacy on COTI’s mainnet after becoming the first recipient of COTI’s $25 million ecosystem fund in 2024. The round comes as privacy is increasingly viewed as “the missing layer between blockchains and institutions,” according to 21Shares in September 2026. Tether’s USDT also went live as a confidential token on Zama in 2026, while EthSystems launched in July 2026 with former Ethereum Foundation researchers pitching privacy infrastructure to banks.
