Snowflake Startup Spotlight: Chaos Labs

Mitigating risk in uncertain environments is a valuable skill, and one that Chaos Labs has mastered for the world of on-chain finance. We talked to the company’s founder and CEO, Omer Goldberg, to learn about his goals, the lessons he’s learned along the way and how Snowflake is helping his business provide real-time risk parameters to a growing customer base.

How would you describe Chaos Labs in a single sentence? 

Chaos Labs builds technology that makes markets safer and more accessible. 

Our risk management systems, oracles and AI models help leading protocols secure billions in value while democratizing access to sophisticated financial tools.

What inspires you as a founder?

Our mission is to fuel the global growth of finance by making it secure, scalable and accessible for everyone. Through our core products, we manage hundreds of billions in volume each month while ensuring our customers feel safe and their funds stay protected. It’s the trust we build and the impact we make that truly drives us.

What problem does Chaos Labs solve? How did you identify that issue?

Four years ago, on-chain finance was just starting out as an industry. There were hundreds of billions of dollars that were flowing in, but there weren’t strong, data-driven tools to help determine how to manage funds and flow in real time. 

My previous role was at Instagram and Facebook, where we would do a lot of A/B testing on production configurations to understand what’s optimal. You can’t do that in finance, because you’re dealing with direct value, so the next best thing you can do is run simulations. We built a simulation platform that was specialized for blockchains and served as a ground to optimize financial platforms, exchanges, lending applications and credit in a secure way.

What’s the coolest thing Chaos Labs is doing with data today?

Data is central to what we do. We calculate value at risk with millions of data points in real time for every application we work with. Our proprietary AI platform then extracts signals that are unique to the industry, which allows us to further secure forecasts and predict where we think risk will strike.

How does Snowflake fit into your data stack?

Snowflake is critical to our data analytics stack. When you talk about blockchain, you’re talking about data at a huge scale. However, there’s a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. To extract the metrics and insights we need, we’ve built our own data pipelines, which transform the data and then pipe it into Snowflake. So, effectively, Snowflake serves as our data lake, where our AI, researchers and analysts can interface with clean data in a fast and reliable way.

Is there a particular feature or capability that enables you to push the envelope in your field of work?

Our systems today power the largest crypto exchanges in the world. Behind the scenes, whenever people are making a request to do a trade, the price and the quote they receive is from us. We needed to create an API to stream the prices in real time with very, very low granularity — we needed slices of a second, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes and so on. Without Snowflake, it would have taken a heroic effort for us to spin up and create all these different views of the data. But at peak trading volumes, the API we created can serve 10,000 requests a second, and it only took one person to set all of that up with Snowflake.

As a company that uses its own AI algorithm, what’s your take on the rapidly changing landscape of LLMs?

I think the recent developments with AI reasoning models are amazing for startups. The threshold for innovation has been reduced significantly, which opens a huge door for startups like us that have unique data to create something that is novel in the marketplace. That’s what we’ve done with Snowflake. We’ve been able to create our proprietary data sets for distillation and other methods of fine-tuning our models, and we can do that with a small team of only five engineers, whereas even a few years ago it might have taken hundreds.

What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve ever received about running a startup?

Most advice isn’t worth much. Success is about taking one step at a time; there’s no playbook for building something meaningful. The real key is consistency. And being brutally honest with yourself about what’s genuinely driving progress for your customers and your business, not just what feels like it is.

What’s one thing you learned the hard way?

There are countless lessons, but one stands out: conviction is key. Be thoughtful in making decisions, but when you recognize you’ve made a wrong move, be deliberate and quick in fixing it.

Finally, when you think about the future of your industry, where do you see Chaos Labs?

We are going to be the backbone of financial markets, providing financial market infrastructure with oracles and risk data, and improving the execution on-chain for any actor that comes on.

Learn more about Chaos Labs, including its current employment opportunities, at chaoslabs.xyz. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program for information on how Snowflake can support your startup goals.