Seed round led by Castle Island Ventures backs the neutral infrastructure setting the standard for onchain execution quality.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Birdai Labs, which builds infrastructure to measure, verify, and improve how trades execute on high-performance blockchains, today announced a $4 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept. The company is building a transparent path to better execution for traders and market makers, and a healthier market for the validators who secure it. The raise comes as the industry’s fastest blockchains converge on multi-proposer architectures, a design shift that fragments control over transaction ordering and makes execution quality the next competitive frontier. The round will fund senior engineering hires and extend the company’s infrastructure at the base of the chain.
Onchain markets have a quiet problem: value is taken from the traders who create it, in the gap between an order and its fill, with no standard to measure it and no way to get it back. Birdai Labs was built to change that.
Birdai Labs was founded and self-funded by Kevin Farrelly and Greg Scanlon, who built the company’s initial infrastructure before raising outside capital. Farrelly previously founded Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning credit company acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2018, where he spent seven years building the firm’s blockchain venture programs. Scanlon is a former Citadel Senior Quantitative Trader who joined Farrelly at Franklin Templeton to build that early-stage venture practice, and built Birdai Labs’ core technology. Farrelly is a proven builder with a successful exit, and both he and Scanlon spent years inside some of the world’s largest traditional finance firms running due diligence on hundreds of early-stage blockchain companies. Watching so many teams win and fail in the blockchain world taught them that data beats narrative, and that the strongest protocols start from what a market does, not the category it claims. Seeing this market from both the builder’s chair and the institutional allocator’s seat while letting the data lead is where the company’s thesis comes from.
Recently, the company expanded the team with the addition of James McClain as founding quantitative researcher. A top-tier quantitative hedge fund veteran with a PhD from Princeton, McClain anchors the company’s quantitative research alongside Scanlon.
Traditional markets earned institutional participation by making execution quality measurable and enforceable, through frameworks like Regulation NMS and order-handling disclosure. The rules for digital assets are still being written. What is not in doubt is what institutions will require before they participate at scale: better execution, fairness, and transparency. Birdai Labs is building the onchain analog: neutral infrastructure that is built to improve execution and make it provable, so participants can meet that standard however the rules arrive.
Most infrastructure starts from theory. Birdai Labs was built from decoded transaction data. The record of how transactions are timed, sequenced, and propagated exists only at the base of a chain. Public APIs show what settled; the base layer shows how. Birdai Labs operates its own infrastructure giving it a ground-truth view of execution. It uses that view not to report on the market, but to change it. Any improvement it delivers is verifiable against the chain itself.
Because it operates from inside the market, Birdai Labs acts at the layer where execution is actually decided, and is built to return value to the participants who create order flow rather than extract it from them. The advantage compounds: the more flow the company sees, the sharper its view of execution becomes, and the more value it can return, which in turn draws more flow. The result is a system designed to grow the pie rather than take a bigger slice.
“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. Too often it isn’t, because value leaks in execution with no standard to hold it to. Closing that gap takes excellence across many layers of execution, and it sits at the core of what we build,” said Kevin Farrelly, co-founder and CEO of Birdai Labs.
“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,” said Matt Walsh, a Founding Partner at Castle Island Ventures. “Kevin and Greg pair institutional market-structure fluency with base-layer engineering, and that combination is perfect founder-market fit.”
About Birdai Labs
Birdai Labs, Inc. is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2025. It operates at the base of the chain and builds infrastructure that measures, verifies, and improves onchain execution and returns value to the traders who create it. Learn more at birdai.xyz.
Media contact: Birdai Labs • 415-539-5595 • 419566@email4pr.com
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SOURCE Birdai Labs
