A Chat With Robin Nordnes, Founder & CEO At Raiku On Blockchain Infrastructure

Tell Us About Raiku

Raiku is a blockchain infrastructure built for a world where transactions can’t fail. We work within the Solana ecosystem, giving developers and institutions the ability to guarantee that their transactions land, predictably, instantly, and at scale. The problem sounds simple but really it runs deep. On Solana today, as many as 75% of transactions can fail during peak demand. For a regular user, that’s a failed purchase and for a trader or institution, it’s a significant financial loss. Our aim is to eliminate that uncertainty.

At its core, Raiku is a high-performance block building layer that works alongside Solana’s existing validator network. Instead of hoping your transaction gets picked up, you can reserve blockspace ahead of time or lock in certainty at the exact moment you need it, with pre-confirmations in under 50ms.

The name comes from Japanese: “Rai” means thunder and lightning, “Kou” means light and the combination felt right for what we’re creating.

How Did You Come Up With The Idea?

Frustration, honestly. I’ve spent over a decade in fintech and distributed systems, and the same theme kept resurfacing: blockchain networks force developers to compromise. Speed or decentralisation. Power or reliability. The industry was spending enormous energy patching a broken model rather than questioning the model itself.

So we took a first-principles approach and asked: what if, instead of working around the constraints, we redesigned financial infrastructure from scratch, built to work in harmony with physical laws? That led to Raiku’s Ahead-of-Time blockspace market, which uses Solana’s own trusted validators to deliver guaranteed execution. We’re not bolting something on top. We’re working within the system to make it perform the way it always should have.
 

How Has The Company Evolved?

We started building in July 2024, so we’re still young, but a lot has happened fast. We shipped our first version to devnet by December 2024, followed shortly after by testnet, and we’re now in the final stages of preparation ahead of our mainnet launch with validator partners.

What began as Solana-specific infrastructure has since grown into a full coordination layer spanning the entire blockchain development stack, and we’re currently moving through our final security auditing and testing phase before a full mainnet release.

On the business side, we’ve raised $13.5 million, with our seed round led by Pantera Capital alongside Jump Crypto, Lightspeed Faction, and Hashkey Capital. We have exceptional angels too. Today, we’re proud to be building alongside 6 validator partners and a growing community of developers around the world.

What Can We Hope To See From Raiku In The Future?

The next major milestone is mainnet. In the near term, developers can expect access to our SDK, opening up integrations ranging from a two-line lite mode to fully customised institutional implementations.

Beyond that, our focus is firmly on the sophisticated end of financial infrastructure, high-frequency trading, staking, institutional vaults, liquidations, and real-time settlement and markets where execution certainty isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a hard requirement. The broader ambition is to enable Solana to realise its vision of becoming the backbone of internal capital markets. We’re not building a niche tool. We’re building the foundation.