NodeKit: Midwest Dropouts Challenge Global Finance

College DAO
4 min readAug 12, 2024

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The Midwest Blockchain Conference is fast approaching, and the region’s blockchain scene is poised for a breakthrough as the new semester kicks off.

As we count down the weeks to the event, we’re thrilled to spotlight some of the incredible founders who have emerged from the Midwest, shaping the future of blockchain in groundbreaking ways.

Our first highlight is Noah Pravecek. A brilliant Founder from Iowa State working on Nodekit. Here is a piece of his story, in his own words.

We hope you enjoy, and remember, give these founders a follow to stay updated with their journey — and if you are looking to meet more brilliant founders, tune into the Midwest Blockchain Conference from Nov 8–9 at the University of Michigan.

From the humble beginnings of starting NodeKit on the Iowa State Campus to landing top VCs like a16z CSX for our pre-seed round, it has been a wild ride.

NodeKit started out as a team of 3 guys from the Midwest focused on decentralizing rollups. I met Nick at Iowa State while Ricardo went to Wisconsin. Ricardo and I went through the LBank Summer Boot Camp and ended up winning the entire thing as the only Midwest or State School team attending which drew initial investor interest. My parents shrugged it off and told me to call them when I got a term sheet.

So as any young founder would do I proceeded to power up Telegram and leverage any connection I could muster to go raise that round with that bold confidence that only youth can fuel. From the start we had a few angel investors committed and then we landed one fund while searching for a lead investor.

We weren’t the cookie cutter Stanford or Ivy League student founders so it was a tough experience for us. Luckily we were able to leverage some of our larger partners to help meet more investors. We missed so many classes during that initial raising period and it got to a point where my grades were getting slightly concerning but I was so excited that nothing was going to stop us at this point. We even missed studying for exams once or twice and in one case that was preparing for a pitch with an investor who ended up investing in NodeKit.

I still remember the exact moment of getting a term sheet. I was sitting in a room on the second floor of the Student Innovation Center in the second room down from an advisor of mine at Iowa State University. I was eating a burrito from Mr. Burrito while preparing for a Zoom meeting with an angel investor when I got the magical text from Borderless telling me that they wanted to lead our pre-seed round. I immediately jumped out of my seat in excitement and probably spilled a bit of the burrito in the process haha.

I even remember a little while later calling my mom to tell her about it while sitting on a curb outside that same Student Innovation Center because they had told me to call them once I got a term sheet so I did just that albeit it was a few days after.

One funny story that I haven’t told anyone yet is that I actually started leaving school a couple of weeks before dropping out and signing the term sheet formally. The rush of being a young dropout founder is one that I will never forget and I wouldn’t give it up for the world. We just knew that the round would close and we had already secured the leads at this point so the rest was just paperwork.

Our pre-seed round ended up having participation from a16z CSX, Borderless Capital, Polygon Ventures, and Blizzard. I wouldn’t change it for the world and it was the absolute best decision to start NodeKit at the time and place that we did.

We first theorized about how atomic composability could be achieved back in October when we had early research around a relay that could provide safety around this functionality and then in January we went back to first principles to figure out what exactly you needed to enable atomic composability and we figured out the superbuilder was the key unlock so then we spent a few months theorizing it before building out the initial version in the span of a few weeks and then it took months to get it working properly before we finally announced it in April and demoed it in June. It was a long winding road to get it done and it all started in the blue room in Ames, Iowa with no windows and a few whiteboards and a team with a dream to get it done. Like most overnight successes it was months in the making.

At NodeKit, we are building a composable network of rollups that are able to unlock synchronous communication through Javelin, which is our superbuilder. Javelin is a custom block builder that can guarantee atomic execution across chains enabling new applications and allowing chains to truly specialize for the first time.

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College DAO
College DAO

Written by College DAO

CollegeDAO is the network college building education infrastructure to integrate web3 at 100+ universities worldwide.

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