Neel Somani

Neel Somani is the founder of Eclipse Labs, the company behind Eclipse, an Ethereum Layer 2 that pioneered the use of the Solana Virtual Machine for execution. A UC Berkeley graduate with a triple major in mathematics, computer science, and business administration, he worked as a quantitative researcher at Citadel before entering crypto, where an early project on Terra pushed him toward building durable scaling infrastructure after its collapse. He raised roughly $65 million for Eclipse across seed and Series A rounds, moved from CEO to Executive Chairman after the 2024 Series A, and stepped down from the role entirely in late 2025 to focus on machine learning research, including formal verification and mechanistic interpretability.

8 talks by Neel Somani