Backed by OpenAI, Tesla, and SpaceX Investors, Midas Is Building Mathematical Infrastructure to Secure AI Systems
World’s Leading Mathematicians Unveil Platform to Transform AI from Plausible to Provable
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Midas, a company that uses mathematical verification to make artificial intelligence systems reliable and secure, today announced its public launch after closing a $10 million funding round led by Valor Equity Partners and Nova Global.
The company is backed by investors behind OpenAI, Tesla, and SpaceX, signaling early confidence from institutions with direct experience building some of the most consequential technology companies in the world.
Midas is formed by 11 medalists from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), the most selective academic competition in the world, where countries are allowed to send only a handful of participants each year. The team brings experience from Jane Street, Google, AWS, NVIDIA, and Mercor, and academic backgrounds spanning Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Princeton, and Duke.
Together, they are applying formal mathematical verification to one of the most urgent problems in AI: trust.
“Modern AI produces fluent, convincing answers, but it cannot prove they are correct,” said Shalim Monteagudo-Contreras, President and Co-Founder of Midas. “Midas is building the barrier between probabilistic outputs and real-world systems. We enforce correctness mathematically, so results are not inferred, argued, or hoped for, but proven before they are allowed through.”
Fluency is not a property you can audit. Proof is.
Renzo Balcazar, CEO and Co-Founder of Midas, added: “Every human institution, from law to science to finance, runs on evidence. Artificial intelligence is the first form of intelligence that operates without it.”
AI is the first intelligence deployed at scale without a proof loop. It produces results without explanation, confidence without causality, output without evidence.
As AI systems generate outputs faster than humans can evaluate them, the era of plausible machines is coming to an end. Coherence is mistaken for correctness. Fluency replaces evidence. Confidence replaces truth.
Plausibility scales. Proof does not, unless it is built into the system.
According to Rodrigo Porto, Tech Lead at Midas, verifying reasoning from the start, rather than checking errors at the end, is what makes trust possible as systems grow too complex for manual review. Midas introduces mathematical evidence at the core of AI, verifying outputs, data, and reasoning so these systems can be trusted where mistakes are not an option.
“Every layer of the AI ecosystem has eventually required its own infrastructure,” said John Stanton, Vice President at Valor Equity Partners. “Verification is the final missing layer. This is not about probabilities, but proof. What sets Midas apart is its culture: a team trained to reject ‘almost correct’ answers and accept only what can be demonstrated.”
The funding enables Midas to translate formal verification research into production-grade infrastructure. The company is already targeting deployments in biotech, defense, hardware design, financial systems, and underlying AI and cloud infrastructure, environments where correctness must be provable. Midas is not a product cycle. It is a structural correction.
In these domains, correctness is not an improvement. It is the baseline.
“At Nova Global, we focus on backing founders with the potential to become historical figures,” said Carlo Agostinelli, founder of Nova Global. “Shalim Monteagudo-Contreras and Renzo Balcazar are already operating at that level. They’ve built a world-class team from scratch and are taking on one of the most fundamental challenges in AI: trust. Their proof-native approach to ensuring AI reliability demonstrates both the technical ambition and founder-market fit is what turns Midas into a generational company.”
For more information, visit trymidas.ai.
About Midas
Midas is building the verification layer for AI — mathematical trust infrastructure that uses formal verification to ensure provable correctness of AI outputs and training data. Founded by a team of 10 IMO/IOI medalists from Cambridge, MIT, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford, alongside senior engineers from leading technology companies, Midas applies formal mathematics to enable enterprise AI deployment across mission-critical sectors including biotech, defense, hardware design, and finance. The company is backed by Valor Equity Partners, Nova Global, and additional tier-one investors.
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Luca Sesti
Luca.Sesti@lcscomms.co
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