preprThe Pitch — Startup Presentation

Elan Neiger
4 min readJul 28, 2024

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Slide 1 — OPENING

Information is the most valuable currency in the world -

Yet we are all guilty of giving away our information online, by oversharing our data to 3rd parties on the internet compared to what they actually need.

This results in the biggest issue facing the digital world today — hacks and data breaches.

This problem can be solved by cryptography, which is a branch of computer science that uses mathematics to guarantee privacy and security.

The most powerful cryptography today for hiding data while proving assertions on the data is called Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and this technology has the power to change the world.

Slide 2 — DEFINITION

What are Zero-Knowledge Proofs, or known by their acronym, ZKPs?

ZKPs are considered one of the greatest achievements of cryptography in the last 50 years.

It is a protocol that allows one party (the Prover) to prove to another party (the Verifier) that certain information is correct, without revealing anything about the content of that information.

In other words, a zero-knowledge-proof is a method to verify the truth of data without giving up the data itself, making it the ultimate solution for privacy and trust in digital environments.

Slide 3 — INGONYAMA

Hi, I’m Elan Neiger, head of marketing and partnerships at Ingonyama. Ingonyama means Lion in Zulu.

We are a semiconductor company on a mission to lower the barrier of entry to Zero Knowledge Proofs.

But why do we need to lower the barrier, what is the problem?

Slide 4 — PROBLEM

Today, Zero-Knowledge Proofs are running on the wrong hardware

ZK requires a massive amount of computational resources and today’s hardware is not built to handle it.

The main bottleneck is proof generation, which is currently too slow and expensive.

Slide 5 — TIMING

ZK algorithms have been developed for 4 decades, and ZK software engineering for around 10 years.

The missing ingredient today is hardware to accelerate proof generation, to commoditize ZK technology and make it accessible.

Slide 6 — Ingonyama

At Ingonyama, we are building the software and hardware stacks to make Zero-Knowledge accessible. We develop open-source software libraries for ZK developers, and repurpose existing hardware like GPU and FPGAs to run ZKP more efficiently.

Our goal is to deliver the world’s first ZPU, or Zero-Knowledge Processing Unit, a chip designed for Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

We imagine a world in which ZK is accessible everywhere, from mobile phones to gaming machines.

Slide 7 — Leadership

Our leadership is composed of experts in mathematics, cryptography and chip design, with decades of experience at the highest levels of their fields.

Slide 8 — Ingonyama

Our team consists of numerous PhDs in physics, information theory, cryptography and mathematics.

Today we have partnerships with some of the most well-known data-centers, hardware manufacturers, and cloud providers in the world.

And to date we raised over 15M in a seed round in order to revolutionize privacy and security with zero knowledge proofs.

Slide 9 — Thanks!

Thank you for your attention

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Elan Neiger

A crypto and blockchain addict and nearly full time podcast listener