Liam Heeger, an engineer who formerly worked on both Ethereum and Solana, is the founder of Unto Labs. The company recently raised $14.4 million to continue development of its new layer-1 blockchain, Thru. The tech company’s latest pursuit centers around creating ThruVM, a new virtual machine based on the RISC-V open computing system. This funding will allow Unto Labs to grow its team of experts and increase the pace of development on its breakthrough technology.

Heeger created ThruVM to overcome the limitations of network-specific virtual machines. Their vision is to be the innovative backbone of the crypto ecosystem. To accomplish this, it’s looking to leverage RISC-V’s potential to make software work better with hardware. Unto Labs thinks this nimble, iterative approach will help realize a much broader set of possibilities for blockchain development.

Indeed, in Heeger’s view, RISC-V’s architecture lends itself more appropriately to the kind of conventional hardware you’d find in a server and laptop.

"RISC-V maps better to conventional hardware that you would find in a server or in a laptop," - Liam Heeger

As of now, Unto Labs has a full-time staff of five. They intend to double their team to ten by the end of the year, with the new capital helping fuel their expansion. This expansion will provide the company with the assets needed to rapidly develop and refine ThruVM. With RISC-V, Unto Labs hopes to have the tools to break out of the limitations of the current blockchain development toolkit.

"There are performance benefits, there are developer benefits, there’s more tooling," - Liam Heeger

Unto Labs currently has a team of five employees and plans to use the new capital to double its staff to ten by the end of the year. This expansion will allow the company to accelerate the development and refinement of ThruVM. By using RISC-V, Unto Labs aims to overcome the constraints of existing blockchain development tools.

"Crypto-specific tools, bespoke crypto VMs, and domain‑specific programming languages pigeon‑hole blockchain development and prevent mainstream industry adoption," - Unto Labs