Sergey Gorbunov still had a university office when his company hit a billion dollars.
That is the odd detail in Axelar's story. In February 2022 the University of Waterloo announced that a computer science professor's startup had raised US$35 million and become a unicorn. Gorbunov, a cryptographer with a PhD from MIT, was the company's CEO. He was also still a professor, someone whose research dealt with secure systems and protocols for networks you cannot trust.
Georgios Vlachos, a fellow MIT graduate with a master's degree, had been on the founding team at Algorand, where the two had worked together.
That research was the real starting point. Blockchains are built to distrust everyone, which makes them good at holding value and terrible at talking to each other. A token on one chain could not simply walk over to another. Gorbunov later described the missing connection as the industry's biggest obstacle.
He did not meet the problem alone. Georgios Vlachos, a fellow MIT graduate with a master's degree, had been on the founding team at Algorand, where the two had worked together. In 2020 they started Axelar to build a network whose only job was to move messages and assets between chains.
The early money came from people who understood the pitch. A US$3.75 million seed round in 2020 included the venture firm DCVC, Binance's investment arm and the AngelList founder Naval Ravikant. A US$25 million Series A followed in mid-2021, in the middle of the crypto boom.
What almost nobody outside the industry saw was the risk hiding inside the idea. A bridge between blockchains concentrates value in one place, and bridges became favourite targets of attackers through 2021 and 2022. Axelar's answer was to run its own network of validators and to treat security as the product rather than a feature.
The valuation arrived just before the market turned. The February 2022 round, led by Dragonfly and Polychain with Rockaway and North Island Ventures also in, priced the company at US$1 billion. Then crypto went cold. Its AXL token was changing hands near US$0.04 in late 2025 according to market trackers, a long way from the headlines about a unicorn.
Whether that gap matters depends on what Axelar is. As a token it has been through a hard cycle. As infrastructure, it remains one of several networks competing to connect blockchains, alongside LayerZero, Wormhole and Chainlink.
The lesson is quieter than the valuation. Gorbunov did not leave the lab to chase a trend. He took a research question, how do you trust a message from a system you do not control, and treated the company as the experiment that would test it.