Why we invested in Birdai

The Venture Dept. is proud to share our investment in Birdai Labs, a company building neutral infrastructure to measure, verify, and improve how trades execute on high-performance blockchains. The $4 million seed round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Metalayer Ventures and The Venture Dept. The round will fund senior engineering hires and extend the company's infrastructure at the base of the chain.

Birdai Labs operates at the base of the chain, decoding every transaction on high-performance blockchains to build a ground-truth picture of how execution actually happens. It uses that picture to improve execution and return value to the participants who generate order flow, rather than the validators and arbitrage traders who extract it from them.

Here's why we invested.

1. Execution quality is the next competitive frontier for onchain markets.

Anyone who has spent time in traditional finance knows that the rules governing order routing and best execution did not emerge from goodwill. They emerged because opaque arrangements between brokers and market makers were systematically disadvantaging the investors generating the flow. The same dynamic plays out onchain today: Validators control transaction ordering and maintain side arrangements with arbitrage traders that extract value from users at the moment of execution. On Solana alone, that extraction grew from $3 million in 2022 to over $1 billion annually in 2025. As high-performance blockchains converge on multi-proposer architectures, execution quality becomes the thing institutions will demand a standard for before they show up at scale. Birdai Labs is building that standard.

2. Founders who have run the trade from both ends.

Kevin Farrelly founded Random Forest Capital, a machine-learning credit company that Franklin Templeton acquired, where he then spent seven years running blockchain venture programs and deploying capital at institutional scale. Greg Scanlon came from Citadel as a senior quantitative trader and built Birdai Labs' core technology, including the mathematical framework for redistributing auction proceeds fairly across all participants. Crucially, both of them spent years inside major traditional finance institutions evaluating early-stage blockchain companies, watching teams win and fail. They built and self-funded the company before raising outside capital, decoding over 50 million transactions to validate their thesis before presenting it to investors. That discipline is not common at the seed stage, and it is a big part of why we backed them.

3. Building for the regulatory environment that institutions will require.

I spent time as a regulator before becoming an investor, and one of the things that experience taught me is that the infrastructure built in anticipation of regulatory clarity tends to outperform the infrastructure built in spite of it. Institutions will not participate in onchain markets at scale without best execution standards, transparent order routing, and audit trails they can point to. Birdai Labs is building with that in mind from day one, designing its auction infrastructure around the principles that made traditional markets trustworthy rather than around the permissiveness that currently exists in the space. That positioning will matter more, not less, as institutional capital looks for a reason to move onchain in size.

We're proud to back Kevin and Greg as they build the execution infrastructure that onchain markets need.