Polina is an undergraduate student at Belarusian State Economic University (BSEU) where she is studying at the faculty of International Business Communication for a degree specializing in Intercultural Communication. In her spare time she enjoys drawing, music and travelling.
The new funding, the startup says, will go on the further development of its decentralized computing system and other projects, including expansion of its staff.
Dfinity, the Switzerland-based public cloud computing platform, has just announced it raised a $102 million private funding round led by Polychain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz’s cryptocurrency fund a16z crypto. With the latest investment, the company brings the total amount of capital to almost $200 million.
Both Polychain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz were leaders in Dfinity’s previous $61 million financing round completed in April. Other investors in this latest investment round include Village Global, Aspect Ventures, SV Angel, Amino Capital, Multicoin Capital, KR1, and Scalar Capital.
Some of the company’s community members have also took part in the funding. Just few weeks ago, Dfinity conducted an airdrop of 35 million of its DFN tokens to allow its community members experiment with the technology.
Led by Dominic Williams, Dfinity is an ambitious project that aims to transform today’s cloud computing market, offering a global system capable of connecting millions of computers via the blockchain technology. The network uses such innovative technologies as Threshold Relay and Probabilistic Slot Consensus, which allows Dfinity to operate with larger speed, security, and scalability.
Using Dfinity, IT businesses will be able to cut their costs by 90% by reducing human capital required. Moreover, users will no longer need to deal with monopolistic intermediaries like eBay.
“The Internet Computer is a public infrastructure that aims to host the world’s next generation of software and services,” Williams said. “The platform provides a novel means to develop and host new software systems where R&D costs can be 90% lower, yet hosted systems are far more secure since the Internet Computer is unhackable, and are always available, highly interoperable and better able to preserve the privacy of confidential data”.
Dfinity is designed to become a high-efficient, infinite, secure, and self-governing “global computer” that would be able to replace such giant cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The network, Williams claims, is already 600 times quicker than the ethereum blockchain.
Chris Dixon, partner at a16z crypto, commented: “We are excited to back Dfinity’s Internet Computer and their vision to host the world’s next generation of software and services on a public network. The Internet Computer is on track to become a critical piece of the future technology stack. This is groundbreaking and a real testament to Dominic and the incredible team at Dfinity.”
Dfinity says it will continue public demonstrations of the project and plans to roll out the first version of its network towards the end of the year.