Raouf Ben-Har is a co-founder of Andalusia Labs, creator of the Karak Network, a universal security layer. ^[1]

Education

Ben-Har graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Computer Science. ^[1]

Career

After graduation, Ben-Har worked as a software engineer intern at various companies, including Google, TikTok, AWS, and Goldman Sachs. In 2021, he became an associate product manager at Coinbase, where he met Drew Patel. Together, they co-founded Andalusia Labs. ^[1]

Andalusia Labs

While working at Coinbase, Ben-Har and Patel created the stealth startup RiskHarbor, a risk management marketplace for DeFi platforms. In April 2024, after changing the company’s name to Andalusia Labs, the Karak mainnet was released.  Under Ben-Har’s leadership, Andalusia Labs raised $48 million in Series A funding from investors, including Coinbase, Lightspeed, Bain Capital, Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, and others. ^[1][2]

Interviews

Building Karak

Blockworks interviewed Ben-Har and Patel about Karak and its purpose in the blockchain industry. He shared the main reason why they created Karak: ^[2]

“They were struggling to bootstrap their own economic security and suffered from highly dilutive reward mechanisms, which was unfortunate, especially for critical infrastructure like bridges, oracles and other infrastructure layers…We envisioned Karak as the key to unlocking this new era of innovation. Similar to how AWS made it easy and affordable for developers to access and build on the cloud, we wanted to make it easy and affordable for developers to access and build on any trust network.”

He also discussed how the restaking protocol can use other assets beyond ETH without risking economic security: ^[2]

“Many assets have lower opportunity costs versus ETH, meaning the [VaaS] has an easier and much more viable path to sustainable yields…There are billions of untapped assets, like stTIA, ARB, and many others, with very few yield opportunities to create sustainable flywheels for VaaS building in their ecosystem. Each ecosystem is different and has its own unique protocols that will create different VaaSs designed on top of their assets. There is no one-size-fits-all for every chain.”