By
Andy Watson
April 4th, 2024
Nillion has raised $20 million and is seeking to decentralize data transfers and storage even further, but without blockchains.
Blockchain-free decentralization platform Nillion has completed a seed funding round of $20 million. The round was led by investment firm Distributed Global, and also saw participation from Chapter One, Big Brain Holdings, OP Crypto, HashKey, and about 150 others.
Nillion Aims to Build New Internet Infrastructure with Fresh Funding
Nillion will be looking to use this fund to provide a new internet infrastructure for secure data storage as well as data computation. According to the firm’s chief marketing officer, Andrew Yeoh, blockchain infrastructures already do a great job with decentralization. However, Nillion now hopes to take that a notch higher. Yeoh said:
“While blockchains decentralize finance, Nillion aims to decentralize everything else and the rest of data.”
According to the startup’s whitepaper, the project is a first-of-its-kind would be based on a mathematical innovation by cryptography professor, Miguel de Vega. Miguel, who is also the team’s chief scientist, invented what the company calls Nil Message Compute (NMC).
About the innovation, founder and general partner of OP Crypto, David Gan has expressed his excitement. He believes Nillion has its eyes set on pioneering a whole new universe of use cases that blockchain could never have imagined. He added:
“What proof-of-work did for blockchain, I think NMC may do for multi-party computation as a technology.”
Meanwhile, Yeoh also sees the $20 million raise as a strategic one. He maintains that the firm could have internally funded the project long ago. At least, they were financially capable to do so. However he also said that they needed the partnership of strong and strategic investors. So, now is the right time.
Interest in Web 3.0
Without a doubt, the raise signals an interesting trend in Web 3.0. Even more so, considering that such a fairly significant amount of money could be raised amid a bear market of this intensity. In fact, Yeoh admits that most of the checks and commitments they got came in after the FTX episode. So, it’s safe to say that the industry’s interest in Web 3.0 technology and its infrastructure, is currently on the rise.
Nillion was founded in November 2021. Its team is made up of ex-employees from Uber, Indiegogo and Hedera Hashgraph, as well as top executives from Coinbase and Nike.