Ronghui Gu

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer CertiK

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Ronghui Gu is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of CertiK, a Web3 security company that audits smart contracts and blockchain systems, and at the same time the inaugural Tang Family Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. His company rests directly on his research. At Yale he was the primary designer and developer of CertiKOS, a formally verified concurrent operating system kernel, and CertiK was founded with his Yale colleague Zhong Shao to apply the same mathematical verification to blockchain code. In April 2022 the company raised an $88 million Series B3 round that valued it at $2 billion. He has continued to publish award-winning systems-verification research at Columbia throughout.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of CertiK, alongside co-founder Zhong Shao, Thomas L. Kempner Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Yale.
• Named by CertiK Global Ltd. as an executive officer and director in SEC Form D filings from 2020 to 2022.
• Raised an $88 million Series B3 in April 2022, co-led by Insight Partners, Tiger Global and Advent International, at a $2 billion valuation and $230 million raised in total.
• Primary designer and developer of CertiKOS and of SeKVM, a verified commodity cloud hypervisor.
• Named Columbia’s inaugural Tang Family Associate Professor of Computer Science in January 2024.
• Recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, a VMware Systems Research Award, five Amazon Research Awards, the OSDI 2021 Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award and the SOSP 2019 Best Paper Award.

Professional Journey

Gu studied computer science at Tsinghua University and graduated in 2011 with highest distinction, ranked three out of a class of 140. He then went to Yale for a Ph.D., working with Zhong Shao’s FLINT group, and became the primary designer and developer of CertiKOS. It was presented at OSDI in 2016 as an extensible architecture for building certified concurrent OS kernels. His thesis received Yale’s Distinguished Dissertation Award, and he completed the doctorate in December 2016.

He moved to the computer science faculty at Columbia University and co-founded CertiK with Shao; the sources read do not give the date he joined Columbia. According to an interview CertiK republished from Forbes China, the company was founded at the end of 2017. The idea was to take formal verification, the use of mathematical proof to show that software behaves as specified, and apply it to smart contracts and blockchain protocols, where one bug can mean an irreversible loss of funds. CertiK’s logo carries the “for all” symbol, which Gu has said stands for the goal of protecting all software systems.

The company grew quickly during the 2021 crypto boom. It raised four rounds in nine months, and Gu told TechCrunch its valuation had grown more than tenfold over that period. The April 2022 Series B3 brought in $88 million at a $2 billion valuation, with Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners joining the lead investors. At the time CertiK said it had 2,500 enterprise clients and was protecting more than $300 billion in crypto assets. The filing entity, CertiK Global Ltd., is a Cayman Islands company with its principal office in New York.

His academic work has continued in parallel. At Columbia his group built SeKVM, a formally verified Linux KVM hypervisor, and published verification work on Arm’s Confidential Compute Architecture, distributed protocols and quantum compilers. He received an NSF CAREER Award and a VMware Systems Research Award in 2023 and was named the inaugural Tang Family Associate Professor in January 2024. His group’s Spoq2 paper won a Best Paper Honorable Mention at ASPLOS 2026.

As CEO he is also a public voice on crypto security. In May 2026 he told CoinDesk that deploying AI agents without isolation or vetting was “a disaster waiting to happen”, and argued that the industry should adopt a zero-trust model in which every command and dependency is continuously verified.

Education

Yale University

Ph.D., Computer Science, 2016

Tsinghua University

B.S., Computer Science, 2011