Anytype – the peer-to-peer web builder designed to “restore our digital freedoms and put the power of our digital lives back in our hands” – is announcing it has raised a $13.4 million round led by Balderton Capital.
Inflection and Square One also “participated, as well as prominent angels from the software and Web3 world including Trent McConnaghy (Ocean), Jutta Steiner (Polka Dot), Luis Cuendo (Aragon) and Adam Wiggins (Heroku).” The update comes on the heels of an anticipated open Beta launch.
In a world where our digital lives are run by centralized algorithms designed to harvest our data and manage what we see, Anytype claims it is “the antithesis – a local-first, peer-to-peer, open-source tool that gives user the freedoms of the web, without sacrificing their privacy, data, or control.”
With Anytype, users create their own online spaces “where all their information is stored in a graph, and in which all their ‘objects’ – their thoughts, tasks, documents, notes, goals and more – are linked thematically. Similarly to how our brains store and access information.”
It doesn’t run on proprietary files, or apps. Users don’t “have to hand over their data, nor are they beholden to the whims of developers.” They don’t even have “to be connected to the web to share, access and distribute information thanks to Anytype’s Anysync protocol that syncs data across a peer-to-peer network in an encrypted, decentralised way.”
Instead, Anytype is “an open ecosystem that encourages contributors to build and govern it together.” All spaces are stored and managed locally and the users are “the only people with access to their data, because they’re the ones in control of their keys.”
The uniqueness of Anytype’s system – and what sets it apart in the market – is that the front-end has been “designed to be visually beautiful, as well as intuitive and accessible.” Rather than building a tool that only developers can use, Anytype is open “to all thanks to its no-code, drag-and-drop interface.”
Zhanna Sharipova, co-founder of Anytype said:
“We believe software should support fundamental digital freedoms – privacy of thoughts, freedom of speech, right to authorship, and autonomy from software providers. These freedoms are the foundation of any well-governed society and with the rise of cryptography and peer-to-peer stack, it’s finally possible to guarantee these freedoms by encoding them into the architecture of the software we use. Previous experience has shown us that people fall in love with products, not protocols. By focusing on no-code tools coupled with our decentralised architecture, we’d like to equip creators and communities to build the web on their own terms.”
As noted in the update, the Internet was built “to be a decentralized distributed network, where information could be shared freely between computers.” The rise of the web as we know it appears to have “changed all this.”
Today, we are locked into “using proprietary files, apps and servers built and owned by a select few. App developers are the keepers of the keys and they decide our recommendations, choose who to promote, who to keep out of view and feed our data into AI systems for their own gain. In this way, developers are capturing the value of what is created, not the creators themselves.”
Anytype’s founders Anton Pronkin and Zhanna Sharipova saw this, first-hand, as they witnessed “their home nation state of Russia use such technologies to seize control of user data and information.”
They founded Anytype to “redress the balance.” In this way, Anytype is on a mission to return the internet to the way it was intended “by rebuilding the systems from scratch.”
Opening up its repositories to its 100,000-strong community is “the next-step on its mission to deliver best-in-class software while supporting fundamental digital freedoms in the world of bits.”
Such is Anytype’s appeal, more than 30,000 people from “a range of professions including software developers, students, nurses, city planners, pharmacists, nuns, and the police took part in Anytype’s Alpha release.”
The private and secure nature of its system also “makes it ideal for people handling sensitive information, such as psychologists, medical doctors and more.” Anytype had 75,000 people on the waitlist for its open beta “ahead of the official launch on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.”
It’s a mission and aim “that wouldn’t have been possible without the rise of significant p2p technological advances that enhance decentralization, which Anytype is now pioneering.”
The funding is being used “to further develop Anytype’s platform and bring it to even more people.”
Colin Hanna, Partner at Balderton said:
“The progress in productivity software has allowed incredible levels of innovation but too often we lose ownership over what we’ve created. With Anytype, users are able to own the information and the networks they create, without an intermediary. At a time when there are crackdowns on digital independence around the world, Anytype allows people to leverage future-proof software while remaining sovereign. We’re proud to be supporting them as they begin an exciting new chapter.”