Kaspa was envisioned by R&D company DAGLabs, through an investment by PolyChain Capital. Nonetheless, Kaspa is a community project, completely open source, no central governance, and no business model.
The founder is Yonatan Sompolinsky, Postdoc CS at Harvard University on the MEV Research Team. Yonatan's 2013 paper on Ghost protocol is cited in the Ethereum Whitepaper.
Kaspa core developers and contributors include Cryptography Doctoral student Shai Wyborski, CS Master Michael Sutton, Mike Zak CS Undergrad Studies, Cryptography researcher Elichai Turkel, and Developer Ori Newman — all of whom contributed immensely to the implementation and stabilization of the network.
PolyChain paid $8,000,000 to rent the brainpower of the above team for over 3 years to research and develop Kaspa. Every block, every second, has $8,000,000 of **cutting edge** tech in it. DagLabs later dissolved.