Web3 startup Nillion has closed a $20m+ fundraise from strategic partners and investors.
The project is “based on a new mathematical innovation, invented by cryptography professor Dr. Miguel de Vega, called Nil Message Compute (NMC) which enables the creation of a non-blockchain decentralized network that aims to open up new, non-blockchain, decentralized use cases.”
Since its founding in November 2021, Nillion has “bootstrapped to a headcount of over 40 with no external funding.”
Members of the Founding Teams of Uber, Indiegogo and Hedera Hashgraph, as well as key executives from Coinbase and Nike have ‘joined forces at Nillion to build the platform.”
The company aims “to become the first non-blockchain decentralized network designed to enable new decentralized use cases while providing the private and secure transfer, storage and computation of data.”
Nillion CEO, Alex Page, reports that “raising $20m+ from over 150 investors was a conscious decision to prevent typical concentrated ownership amongst a small number of venture capitalists who may have adverse incentives to ‘dump’ in the long-term.”
“We’ve seen so many web3 projects suffer because their network was owned by early investors with excessively concentrated holdings. That’s exactly why we passed on certain Silicon Valley VCs who wanted over 5% of tokens to simply lend their name to the project. Instead we carefully invited a widely distributed pool of early contributors who love, support and add value to the project.”
The investment round was “led by Distributed Global, and includes investment from Big Brain Holdings, Chapter One, GSR, Hashkey, OP Crypto, SALT Fund and 150+ others.”
David Gan, GP of OP Crypto said:
“It’s very rare to have a truly novel math innovation being built by an elite ‘Avengers level’ team. Nillion could open a new universe of use cases blockchain never imagined. What proof of work did for blockchain, I think NMC may do for Multi-Party Computation as a technology.”
Another investor, Alex Klokus of SALT Fund states:
“Nillion is a world-class team pursuing an extremely ambitious,order of magnitude improvement over existing MPC technology. If they pull it off, it could be revolutionary.”
NMC enables “the fragmentation and dispersion of data across the Nillion network of nodes which creates privacy while still allowing the underlying data to be computed on quickly.”
A key feature of the technology is “that this process occurs without the need for communication between the nodes.”
According to the team, company website and online materials, NMC technology unlocks new utility in web3, “such as decentralized credit scoring, decentralized trusted execution environments, private NFTs and decentralized secure storage services.”
Other potential use cases promised outside of web3 “include storing healthcare records on the network while being able to run analysis on the records without jeopardizing an individual’s right to privacy.”