Raouf Ben-Har is a co-founder of Andalusia Labs, an applied research lab building internet-native economic infrastructure. ^{[1] [3]}​

Education

Ben-Har dropped out from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied Computer Science.

Career

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

Andalusia Labs

While working at Coinbase, Ben-Har and Patel created the stealth startup RiskHarbor, a $1.1B+ AUM autonomous risk management marketplace. In 2024, they built Karak, a $1.4B AUM shared security platform. Under Ben-Har’s leadership, Andalusia Labs raised $48 million in Series A funding from investors, including Coinbase, Lightspeed, Bain Capital, Mubadala, Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, and others. ^[1]​^[2]​^[4]​

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.”