January 14, 2026 lands like a quiet alarm clock you cannot snooze. Project Eleven just closed a $20M Series A at a $120M valuation, led by Castle Island Ventures, and if that sounds academic, good....
January 14, 2026 lands like a quiet alarm clock you cannot snooze. Project Eleven just closed a $20M Series A at a $120M valuation, led by Castle Island Ventures, and if that sounds academic, good. This story lives in the uncomfortable overlap of math, money, and time. The place where risk compounds silently and the future does not ask for permission.
Project Eleven was founded on October 31, 2024, Bitcoin White Paper Day, which is either poetic or extremely deliberate. The original question was simple and disrespectful in the best way: what happens to $4T+ in digital assets when the cryptography securing them stops being a law of nature and starts being a countdown. Finn Murphy pulled on that thread, and the implications did not blink first.
Alex Pruden joined as CEO in early 2025 and brought gravity to the room. Former U.S. Army Infantry and Special Operations officer, former CEO of Aleo, investor, operator, now Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA candidate. Calm voice, sharp edges. Alongside Alex Pruden are co-founders Conor Deegan, a cryptography and quantum computing specialist who ships instead of theorizes, and Leeor Mushin, who understands capital, timing, and how ecosystems actually move when incentives get real.
What matters is speed with substance. In roughly 15 months, Project Eleven shipped Yellowpages live on Bitcoin mainnet, generating post-quantum keys for thousands of wallets without touching UTXOs. They built the first post-quantum testnet for a major network with Solana, running ML-DSA end to end. They launched the Q-Day Clock to track how fast the future is approaching, the Q-Day Prize to challenge assumptions with a 1 BTC bounty, and the Bitcoin Risq List to quantify exposure instead of hand-waving it away.
Capital followed conviction. Castle Island Ventures leaned in again. Coinbase Ventures joined. Variant Fund, Quantonation, Nebular, and Formation came back from seed. Fin Capital, Lattice Fund, Satstreet Ventures, Nascent Ventures, and Balaji Srinivasan rounded out the table. That is not passive money. That is people who understand second-order effects and still signed the wire.
The name matters. Eleven is what you dial when ten is not enough. Project Eleven is not selling fear or hype. They are selling sequencing, readiness, and a way to migrate systems with long memory without breaking trust mid-stride. This is infrastructure for assets meant to outlive their creators, built by people who respect time as the real adversary.