Randamu Distributed Computing Case Study | SproutVest
At a glance
Company: Randamu
Industry: Decentralized Infrastructure / Cryptography / Web3
Role: Co-Founder & CEO, 24 months
Note: Randamu is a company Erick Watson co-founded and led full-time. It is not a SproutVest client engagement, and appears here because the venture-building work is directly relevant to the practice.
Focus: Venture operations, product strategy, Web3 ecosystem development
Headline result: $3.3M pre-seed raised and dcipher.network launched; the venture was later wound down
Context
Randamu was a decentralized infrastructure company spun out from Protocol Labs, built on the drand project’s publicly verifiable randomness beacon. Its mission was to commercialize a new generation of cryptographic coordination primitives: verifiable randomness, threshold encryption, off-chain compute orchestration, and programmatic settlement. As part of the spin-out, Erick Watson co-founded Randamu and served as its CEO on a full-time basis through the company’s first two years.
The challenge
A cryptography company emerging from a research environment starts with everything to build. After separating from Protocol Labs, Randamu had no executive leadership, no independent governance, and no operating structure. Its core technology, drand, was offered free as a public good, so the commercial products had to be built for Web3 ecosystems, gaming platforms, and DeFi without undermining that open-source foundation. The company needed capital, which meant crafting an investor story that balanced open-source ethos with commercial goals, and it needed to operate as a globally distributed team while building the ecosystem partnerships its adoption depended on.
What he did
As co-founder and CEO, Erick defined Randamu’s mission around secure, unbiased, and verifiable cryptographic infrastructure and built a two-year roadmap tying technical milestones to funding and market goals. He led the early fundraising, securing $3.3M in pre-seed funding led by PLVS Capital, which gave the company runway for R&D and ecosystem development.
Operationally, he assembled a distributed team of engineers, cryptographers, and product leaders, and established governance through the Swiss Threshold Association. The product work centered on dcipher.network, a programmable platform for randomness, conditional encryption, and off-chain compute that let developers build verifiable, trustless systems. Alongside development, he built partnerships across the ecosystem, including the Filecoin Foundation, SSV Network, DIA Data, Scroll, and other Layer 2 networks.
Results
Over 24 months, the work took Randamu from a paper spin-out to a fully operational, venture-backed Web3 company:
- $3.3M in pre-seed funding secured, sustaining more than two years of product development
- dcipher.network launched, delivering verifiable randomness, threshold encryption, and programmable settlement in production
- A distributed team and Swiss governance structure built from zero
- Ecosystem partnerships established with the Filecoin Foundation, SSV Network, DIA Data, Scroll, and other Layer 2 networks
Randamu was wound down in 2026. The arc stands as a complete venture-building cycle: formation, funding, team, product launch, and ecosystem, delivered inside 24 months.
The work above starts with an honest read of the leadership behind it
The Trellis Leadership Diagnostic applies that discipline to how you run your company: 24 behavior-anchored items across six dimensions, about 12 minutes, instant results, free to take self-serve. The full version adds Erick's written perspective and a 90-minute debrief; $2,500, credited in full toward the first month of coaching.
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