Vladimir Novakovski

Novakovski immigrated from Russia to the United States as a child and later won places on the U.S. national teams for the International Olympiad in Informatics and the International Physics Olympiad. He entered Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry at 16 and graduated early.⁠[1][1]

At 18, Novakovski began working at the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group; he has said Citadel CEO Ken GriffinKen GriffinKen Griffin is an American hedge fund manager and investor, the founder and CEO of the hedge fund firm Citadel and the founder of the market maker Citadel Securities. In 2022 he announced the move of both firms’ global headquarters from Chicago to Miami; he is also a major donor to the U.S. Republican Party and has made large gifts to Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University, and other institutions.Open the full entry personally recruited him. He then spent almost 15 years as an engineer and trader at various companies before becoming a founder himself.⁠[1][1][1]

During that period he led the machine learning team at the question-and-answer site QuoraQuoraQuora is an American question-and-answer and knowledge-sharing website and the company that operates it, Quora, Inc., whose core product centers on users asking, answering, and voting to rank content; since 2022, the company has also offered Poe, a chat platform that aggregates AI models from multiple companies.Open the full entry and then served as chief technology officer of Euclid Analytics, which WeWorkWeWorkWeWork is a flexible workspace company founded in New York in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. It provides private offices, coworking space, meeting rooms and enterprise workplace services. After withdrawing its IPO plan in 2019, it went public through a BowX merger in 2021, entered Chapter 11 in 2023 and emerged from restructuring in June 2024, continuing as a private company.Open the full entry acquired in 2017; he also worked at the investment technology company Addepar, alongside his future co-founder Scott Wu.⁠[2][1]

In 2017, Novakovski co-founded Lunchclub, a social networking platform that uses artificial intelligence to arrange one-on-one professional meetings, with Scott Wu and Hayley Leibson, and served as its chief executive officer.⁠[1][1][3][2]

In September 2019, Lunchclub announced a $4 million seed round led by Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry, with investments also coming from Quora’s co-founder, the two Robinhood co-founders and Flexport’s co-founders. Lunchclub lets users set objectives such as raising funding or finding a co-founder and then arranges “warm intro” meetings for them by email; Novakovski said most of the data the platform needed could be drawn from other public sources on the web.⁠[2][2][2][2]

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Lunchclub quickly turned to virtual video meetings, and its subsequent growth led to a $24.2 million Series A round led by Nicole Quinn of LightspeedLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry at a valuation above $100 million; the three founders raised about $30 million in total for Lunchclub.⁠[3][3][1]

In 2022, Lunchclub’s growth plateaued. Novakovski recalled that there were three paths: make it into something profitable but small, try to turn it into something like TikTok or SnapchatSnapchatA visual messaging and social app developed by Snap Inc., launched in 2011, with photo and video messaging, Stories, augmented-reality Lenses, Snap Map and Spotlight.Open the full entry, or pivot to a new direction they were truly excited about. Scott Wu left to found the AI coding company Cognition, while Novakovski returned to trading, pivoting Lunchclub to Lighter and retaining 80% of the team.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In 2024, Lighter closed a previously unreported $21 million round led by Haun VenturesHaun VenturesHaun Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in 2022 by Katie Haun, a former U.S. federal prosecutor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. It focuses on digital assets, financial infrastructure, and related frontier technologies; it raised $1.5 billion across two funds at launch and a further $1 billion in 2026.Open the full entry and Craft Ventures, with participation from Dragonfly, Robot Ventures and others.⁠[1]

After two years of development and testing, Novakovski launched Lighter in January 2025. Lighter is both a decentralized exchange and a blockchain, mainly used for trading cryptocurrency perpetual futures; unlike HyperliquidHyperliquidHyperliquid is a layer-one blockchain designed from scratch for financial trading. It uses its own HyperBFT consensus, has perpetual futures and spot order books built into the chain (HyperCore), and offers an Ethereum-compatible smart contract environment (HyperEVM); its native token is HYPE. Launched in 2023, it became one of the largest decentralized perpetual futures venues thanks to its fully onchain order books, and later opened permissionless deployment of perpetual markets on commodities, stock indices and FX, as well as outcome markets, through HIP-3 and HIP-4.Open the full entry, which runs on its own layer 1 blockchain, Lighter is a layer 2 network on Ethereum, which Novakovski considers a key distinction between the two.⁠[1][1][1]

Lighter is built as a zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum; its core system, Lighter Core, uses succinct cryptographic proofs to verify the execution of each batch of transactions and uses Ethereum as the anchoring layer for proofs and system state, so users can deposit or withdraw assets directly through Ethereum. As of October 2026, Lighter has a native token, LIT, used for staking and protocol incentives and bought back by the protocol with trading fee revenue.⁠[4][5][5][6][6]

On November 11, 2025, Lighter announced a new $68 million funding round led by Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry and Ribbit CapitalRibbit CapitalRibbit Capital is a venture-capital firm founded in 2012 by Meyer “Micky” Malka and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It began with financial-technology investing and has expanded into AI, commerce and related infrastructure. Its investments include Coinbase, Robinhood and Nubank.Open the full entry, with participation from Haun Ventures and Robinhood; two people familiar with the deal said the round valued Lighter at about $1.5 billion, while Novakovski declined to comment on the valuation and said only that the deal was for equity and token warrants. Together with the 2024 round, Lighter had raised almost $90 million. Founders Fund partner Joey Krug said Novakovski and his team were the main reason for the investment.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

Novakovski said Lighter aims to be the infrastructure layer that verifies everything in finance happens fairly, correctly and transparently, and said the company was already profitable.⁠[1][1]

In January 2026, on Fortune’s Crypto Playbook podcast, Novakovski said he was optimistic about crypto’s prospects in 2026, that the most important macro story was the coming regulatory clarity in the United States, which would open the biggest financial market to these technologies, and that he hoped to see institutions begin trading perpetual futures in a meaningful way that year, bringing DeFi and TradFi closer to converging.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

Lighter: Official website: https://lighter.xyz/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8][4]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vnovakovski/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]