Onchain execution infra startup Birdai Labs raises $4M seed led by Castle Island

Birdai Labs has raised a $4 million seed round to build infrastructure that measures, verifies, and improves how trades execute on high-performance blockchains. The round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept, according to the company.

The San Francisco-based startup is positioning itself as neutral market infrastructure for digital assets, focused on improving onchain execution quality and returning value to the traders and market makers who generate order flow. Funds will be used to hire senior engineers and extend the company's infrastructure at the base layer of supported chains.

Birdai Labs says it operates its own low-level infrastructure to decode transaction data directly from the base chain, giving it what it calls a ground-truth view into how transactions are timed, sequenced, and propagated. That data is used not just for analytics but to intervene at the layer where execution is decided, with outcomes that are verifiable against the chain itself.

The company was founded and initially self-funded by CEO Kevin Farrelly and co-founder Greg Scanlon. Farrelly previously founded Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning credit firm acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2018, where he later worked on blockchain venture programs. Scanlon is a former Citadel senior quantitative trader who joined Franklin Templeton to co-build its early-stage blockchain venture practice and developed Birdai's core technology.

Birdai has recently added James McClain, a quantitative hedge fund veteran with a PhD from Princeton, as founding quantitative researcher to anchor research alongside Scanlon. The team frames its thesis around institutional expectations for measurable, enforceable execution quality, drawing an analogy to frameworks such as Regulation NMS and order-handling disclosure in traditional markets.

"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," Farrelly said in the announcement. Castle Island founding partner Matt Walsh said Birdai is building "critical infrastructure" for stablecoin and RWA tokenization markets that require greater trust and transparency around execution.