Birdai Labs raises $4 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures

Birdai Labs has raised a $4 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept, as it expands infrastructure aimed at measuring, verifying and improving how trades execute on high-performance blockchains. The company said the funding will support senior engineering hires and extend its infrastructure at the base layer of the chains it monitors. Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, Birdai Labs was self-funded initially by Kevin Farrelly and Greg Scanlon, who built its early infrastructure before seeking outside capital. Farrelly previously founded Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning credit company acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2018, and later spent seven years building Franklin Templeton's blockchain venture programs. Scanlon, a former Citadel senior quantitative trader, joined Farrelly at Franklin Templeton to build that venture practice and developed Birdai Labs' core technology. James McClain, a quantitative hedge fund veteran with a PhD from Princeton, recently joined as founding quantitative researcher. The startup is focused on the gap between when an onchain trade order is placed and when it is filled, a part of market structure where value can be lost without a standard way to measure or recover it. Birdai Labs says operating infrastructure at the chains' base layer gives it visibility into how transactions are timed, sequenced and propagated, rather than just the final settled outcome visible through public APIs (application programming interfaces). It says that access allows execution improvements to be verified directly against the chain itself. The funding comes as fast blockchains move toward multi-proposer architectures, in which transaction ordering is split across multiple parties rather than controlled by a single block builder. Birdai Labs argues that this fragmentation will make execution quality harder to measure and enforce, turning it into a key competitive issue for high-performance chains. Kevin Farrelly said institutional adoption of onchain markets will require DeFi (blockchain-based finance) liquidity costs to be at least as good as those in traditional finance and "provably so," while Castle Island Ventures founding partner Matt Walsh said stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets could become a "clear killer app" for public blockchains and that Birdai Labs is building infrastructure that can add trust and accelerate that market.