Zeru, the team behind zScore, DeFi’s newest primitive, is proud to announce that we have raised $300K in pre-seed funding at a $15M valuation, backed by some of the most forward-thinking builders and ecosystems in crypto.

We are thrilled to be supported by respected angel investors like:

• Ganesh (Covalent)

• Chandan Choudhury (Router Protocol)

• Nikhil Raghuveera (Predicate)

• David Phelps (JokeRace)

• Yarden and Dean (Othentic)

• Kamesh and Ram (OpenLedger)

In addition to the $300K, we have also secured:

• A strategic grant from the EigenCloud

• Acceptance into Sentient’s builder program

• Induction into Berachain’s RFA program

• Selection for IMUA’s Ignite accelerator

As AI-generated content, bots, wallets, and fake identities flood the digital world, trust has broken down — across social platforms, DeFi protocols, marketplaces, and even DAOs. Coordination is collapsing under the weight of inauthentic and malicious activities.

What’s missing is a verifiable, trustable and composable reputation layer — one that works across apps, chains, and user interfaces. Not just to prove identity, but to prove value, intent, and credibility. Zeru is building exactly that with zScore, backed by these incredible organizations, programs and angel investors.

At the core of Zeru’s suite of products is zScore — a decentralized reputation protocol that quantifies wallet behavior into a meaningful trust score. Rather than focusing on identity or wealth, zScore examines what you actually do onchain: activities like lending, voting, providing liquidity, joining DAOs, and other actions.

Our AI models — developed by researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a group of experienced advisors — cluster wallets based on behavioral patterns creating a more robust, fair, and tamper-resistant measure of contribution. You can read through several reports to see zScore in action here and here.

This is reputation as infrastructure, powering use cases like undercollateralized lending, Sybil-resistant airdrops, governance filters, lower swap fees, and agentic coordination.

Since launching on mainnet in February 2025, Zeru has already:

• Generated 3 million+ reputation scores

• Backed by $2.5B in economic security by EigenCloud operators including renzo, p2p et al

• Built an active community of 20,000+ followers on X and 6,000+ members on Discord

• Partnered with protocols like Predicate, Reclaim, Lagrange, and Ungate

We’ve also been invited to speak at Token2049 Singapore, ETH Milan, and Devcon Bangkok — a testament to the growing recognition of reputation as a foundational layer. Along the way, we have been recognized by the angels and organizations above, and others, who have chosen to support Zeru with their time, money and energy.

This funding will accelerate:

• Expansion of our AI and data engineering teams

• Rollout of new models for social, professional, financial, and identity reputation

• Broader protocol integrations and SDK support

• Our token generation event in Q4 2025

• Revenue-positive operations before the end of 2025

• First 5 integrations in progress

Eventually, we plan to build our own blockchain focused on reputation and create business solutions that verify companies, suppliers, and employees.

The future of the internet will be agentic — shaped by autonomous agents, composable wallets, and self-verifying credentials. However, this future can only function with robust a reputation system.

Zeru is building the universal reputation layer for that world — a system that enables AI to trust humans, protocols to identify real users, and communities to coordinate with context.

In a world flooded with synthetic identities, reputation is how we prove we’re real — and how we move forward.

zScore APIs are now live, and our team is onboarding design partners across DeFi, DAOs, NFTs, insurance, and agentic systems.

Whether you’re building a lending market, airdrop campaign, governance DAO, or identity solution — reputation will define how real your users are.

If you're ready to build with verifiable trust, get in touch on Telegram, Discord, X or at support@zeru.finance.