Although Sepana did not disclose its valuation after the funding round, it plans to hire more talent and launch a new and improved product.
Decentralized search startup Sepana has raised $10 million in a funding round led by venture firms Hack VC and Pitango First.
In addition to the fundraiser’s lead investors, Protocol Labs, Lattice Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan were also investors in the round. However, Sepana refrained from sharing its valuation, only stating that the funding round closed this week. In addition, reports say that the newly-generated capital will go towards hiring senior blockchain engineers and search experts for the company. Furthermore, Sepana seeks to launch a product geared towards fostering the “search community” around the product.
Founded by brothers Daniel and David Keyes, Sepana plans to build a fully decentralized peer-to-peer search protocol in the long term. According to the decentralized search platform, such an infrastructure will help to create information bridges between decentralized applications and protocols. As Sepana sees it, this development will also improve search outcomes, with privacy being a key underlying factor. Commenting on the company’s stated end goal, co-founder Daniel Keyes explained in a media session:
“The algorithms that dictate our online lives should be open-source and community-governed.”
Sepana looks to make a wide range of Web3 content more discoverable via its search tooling. Such decentralized content includes decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). One way the company is going about making Web3 content more discoverable is through the use of an upcoming related search API. This tool will allow decentralized applications (dApps) to integrate Sepana’s search infrastructure.
Sepana claims that countless search queries on blockchains and dApps such as Lens and Mirror are already backed by its tooling.
Sepana Funding Round Part of Broader Trend in Web3 Search Space
The Sepana funding round follows similar initiatives within the Web3 search and indexing tool space. For instance, last month, nxyz secured $40 million in a Series A funding round spearheaded by Web3 investment firm Paradigm. Participating investors from the nxyz funding round were Coinbase Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock Partners. Speaking on nxyz at the time, CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, explained:
“We created nxyz so that developers can focus on building at scale, and have the fast and simple method for indexing data they need. I’m convinced this is exactly the kind of innovation needed to help ensure the widespread adoption and success of web3.”
Blockchain indexer nxyz is a spinoff of the private search engine Neeva. Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva in 2019 and is also its CEO. Furthermore, Crunchbase data states that the private search engine has received total funding of $77.5 million.
Lighthouse Labs, another Web3 search and indexing facilitator, raised $7 million in seed funding back in May. The funds came ahead of the Montreal-based crypto startup’s planned launch of its metaverse search engine.
Accel, BlockTower, and Animoca Brands served as lead investors of the Lighthouse Labs’ round.
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