Almost every number about LayerZero arrived with a correction attached. In April 2023, when the company raised US$120 million at a US$3 billion valuation, one outlet placed it in New York. CoinDesk later corrected that: the company is Vancouver-based, a detail BetaKit also confirms. A founder can build a global protocol from a rainy Canadian city, and the press can still lose track of where.
The sources available to us say little about the people. Bryan Pellegrino is co-founder and CEO, Ryan Zarick is co-founder and CTO, and Caleb Banister is the third co-founder.
LayerZero pitched a lighter messaging layer that developers could plug into their own applications and set their own security rules around.
What is documented is how fast the money moved. LayerZero Labs was founded in 2021. By March 2022 it had raised US$135 million at a US$1 billion valuation, with Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia and FTX Ventures among the co-leaders. Just over a year later came the Series B at three times that valuation. Reports differ on who led it: a16z crypto is named by Fortune, while others credit OpenSea Ventures and The Spartan Group.
The product explains the appetite. Blockchains cannot natively talk to each other, and the early fix, bridges that locked assets in a vault on one chain and minted copies on another, was a repeated target for hackers. LayerZero pitched a lighter messaging layer that developers could plug into their own applications and set their own security rules around.
The record since is thinner. A US$55 million investment was reported in May 2025, and a strategic round followed in February 2026.
The lesson here is a quiet one about claims. In a field where valuations are headlines, the founders who last are the ones whose basics hold up under checking: where the company is, who led the round, what it actually does. LayerZero's technical bet made it a top-twenty Canadian-linked startup by funding. Whether it endures depends on the same boring thing every infrastructure company depends on, which is being reliable when other people build on top of it.