According to a source familiar with the situation, Tim Berners the inventor of web, his firm Inrupt has raised roughly $30 million in its ‘Series A’ funding round.
Inrupt’s fresh round was led by Forte Ventures, the two companies stated on Thursday, but neither would reveal the size of the deal. “All previous investors,” such as Akamai Technologies and Glasswing Ventures, as well as new investors Allstate and the Minderoo Foundation’s Frontier Technology Initiative, participated in the round.
Inrupt, created by Tim Berners-Lee, the developer of the web’s standards, and John Bruce, a technologist, is seeking to “reshape the internet” by developing a platform that offers consumers control over their data. Bruce Schneier, a cryptography expert, is part of the Inrupt team.
“Business transformation is hampered by different parts of one’s life being managed by different silos, each of which looks after one vertical slice of life,” said Berners-Lee in a statement.
“Meanwhile, that data is exploited by the silo in question, leading to increasing, very reasonable, public skepticism about how personal data is being misused.”
Inrupt’s software allows users to save their personal information in a POD (Personal Online Datastores). These PODs are compatible with decentralized applications and can be detached at any time by the user.
Inrupt claims it is seeking to duplicate the basic infrastructure of companies such as Visa for credit card processing and Verisign, which commercialized the DNS standard, according to an investor pitch.
“This approach allows consumers to take control of their data while giving governments and companies — and their app developers — a more seamless transition into a new internet era and regulatory regime (e.g., GDPR),” wrote Hunter Hartwell, principal at Forte Ventures, in a blog post.
Furthermore he added, “Our thesis for the investment in Inrupt is a simple one: consumers, governments, and many companies are eager to move towards a truly open and collaborative web (aka Web3), and Inrupt’s enterprise Solid server (ESS) represents the most technically advanced and commercially viable path to realizing that future.
Embedded in our thesis is the belief that this top-tier team is uniquely qualified to meet the requirements and expectations of government and corporate partners, as well as the broader public.”
Governments and businesses are among Inrupt’s clients. The business has negotiated contracts with the governments of Sweden, Argentina, and Basque. According to the study, it made $225,000 in sales last year and $200,000 in September.
The startup will deploy the funds to “expand its global footprint of Solid deployments in both the government sector and the commercial sector,” said Hartwell.
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