Luxembourg-based venture capital firm Nextblock has invested $3 million to fully fund the seed round for Soda Labs, a cryptographic infrastructure startup developing programmable privacy tools for public blockchains. The investment will provide Soda Labs with a 12- to 18-month runway to expand its commercial operations, scale its validator network, and advance integrations with financial institutions, tokenization platforms, and payment companies.
The fundamental challenge Soda Labs addresses is the transparency inherent to public blockchains, which conflicts with the confidentiality requirements of regulated financial activity. As stablecoins and tokenized assets increasingly move onchain, privacy infrastructure becomes essential for institutional participation.
According to Pieter van Poecke, founder and general partner of Nextblock, the investment targets programmable privacy—a framework that protects sensitive financial data while enforcing regulatory compliance. "A bank, asset manager, or company cannot realistically expose every position, trade, balance, treasury movement or client transaction to the entire internet," van Poecke explained. "Privacy stops being a niche feature and starts becoming a prerequisite."
Technical Approach
Soda Labs uses standard cryptography rather than specialized hardware, combining garbled circuits with multiparty computation on standard cloud CPUs. The company's product, Soda Bubble, operates as a chain-agnostic coprocessor that processes privacy workloads from various blockchains without exposing underlying private data publicly or to Soda Labs itself.
The seed funding will support expansion of Soda Bubble, team growth, and ongoing pilots with banks, payment providers, and tokenization platforms, with the goal of converting these trials into production deployments.
Security Considerations
Van Poecke highlighted evolving security pressures facing blockchain infrastructure, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing. While AI accelerates vulnerability discovery and changes the economics of security research, quantum computing represents a longer-term cryptographic threat to public-key systems. He argued that the industry must address both immediate AI-driven risks today while building post-quantum resistance proactively.
Soda Labs was founded two and a half years ago and already operates with paying customers and a working product, according to van Poecke.
