Birdai raises $4M seed to make onchain trade execution measurable

What's the deal? BirdaiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → Labs has raised a $4 million seed round led by Castle Island VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with participation from Metalayer VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and The Venture Dept. The company builds infrastructure to measure, verify, and improve how trades execute on high-performance blockchains.

Why now? The industry's fastest blockchains are converging on multi-proposer architectures, a design shift that fragments control over transaction ordering. That makes execution quality — the gap between an order and its fill — the next competitive frontier.

What's the endgame? Birdai wants to return value to the traders and market makers who create order flow, rather than let it be extracted from them. It runs its own infrastructure at the base of the chain, giving it a ground-truth view of how transactions are timed, sequenced, and propagated.

Who's behind it? Founders Kevin Farrelly and Greg Scanlon self-funded the company before raising outside capital. Farrelly founded Random Forest Capital, acquired by Franklin Templeton in 2018; Scanlon is a former Citadel senior quantitative trader who built Birdai's core technology.

The key hire: The company added James McClain as founding quantitative researcher. A quantitative hedge fund veteran with a PhD from Princeton, he anchors Birdai's research alongside Scanlon. The seed money will also fund further senior engineering hires.

The signal: Traditional markets earned institutional participation by making execution quality measurable and enforceable, through frameworks like Regulation NMS. The rules for digital assets are still being written, but institutions will demand better execution, fairness, and transparency before joining at scale. At $4 million, Birdai's round sits in the middle of comparable seed deals — a modest bet on becoming the neutral infrastructure that sets that standard.

Image credit: Birdai