Icebreaker – which is the world’s first open professional network – announced a $5 million seed round, led by CoinFund. This funding round will help grow Icebreaker’s world-class team and further its progress toward scaling the internet’s open, verifiable, and trusted professional network. This funding round also includes participation from Accomplice, Anagram, Legion Capital, and more than 30 founder angels.
Digital networking is becoming saturated with AI-driven noise and fake personas. And Icebreaker was created to enable professionals to seamlessly tap their existing profiles and networks to surface exceptional people and opportunities, utilizing recent advancements in cryptographically verifiable identity.
Through Icebreaker, anyone can instantly prove credentials about themselves, provide verifiable endorsements for others, and utilize this shared context to search their network freely. So, an open graph of reputation and identity emerges. This model strikes at the primary weakness of existing closed networks and allows professionals to find top-tier candidates and opportunities wherever they may be online, based on shared context and trust.
As a co-creator of Google’s largest cross-identity measurement and marketing platform, Icebreaker co-founder Dan Stone is an expert in building products at the intersection of data, privacy, and AI. And in early 2021, he met co-founder Jack Dillé via pseudonymous forum discussing NFTs before they realized two two of them worked at Google. At the time, Dillé worked on YouTube and Google Shopping as a UX leader. Later that year, Dan and Jack left Google to work full-time in crypto at Coinbase and SZNS, respectively, before leaving their roles in early 2023 to launch Icebreaker.
At Icebreaker, Stone and Dillé are taking on one of the digital age’s most complex and consequential problems: finding high-quality candidates and opportunities.
Icebreaker piloted early iterations of the platform through engagements with other Web3 companies like Coinbase, Opensea, and Polygon Labs, and at industry conferences like DevConnect in Istanbul and FarCon in Santa Monica. And last year, they debuted their first Passport program at Station3, a Web3 co-working space and innovation hub. This program has enabled founder Bob Loukas to track verified engagement with Station3 programming, whether the members are physically at the headquarters in downtown Manhattan, or checking in digitally from worldwide.
With Icebreaker, anyone can create curated, high-context profiles based on one or more existing identities like LinkedIn, GitHub, X, or Farcaster by visiting icebreaker.xyz and logging in with email, Farcaster, or Ethereum Wallet. And professionals can signal their networking status, skill, work experience, professional highlights, and verified credentials, in addition to linking and optionally verifying their choice of more than 50 account types.
The current and former colleagues can endorse each other with just two taps while seeing who else in their network is making and receiving endorsements. Most importantly, every professional can search the entirety of their network for free, forever, using more powerful filters than competitors who charge thousands of dollars annually.
This summer, the team of six will be focusing on bringing new social graphs into the application on behalf of users as well as promoting connectivity through professional skill endorsements and recommendations.
KEY QUOTES:
“The world runs on trust. Until now, it’s been impossible to see because our existing networks optimize for engagement over signal. Yet every leader knows the loudest or most followed person is rarely the best. Icebreaker lets you see who your close network trusts so you can cut through the noise to surface the talent and opportunities that are quiet, yet exceptional.”
- Icebreaker co-founder Dan Stone
“Seeing people take full control and ownership of their network is really magical. Existing platforms make it intentionally difficult to build and use our own connections, and often require us to pay just to navigate our own network. We have a core belief that data should be completely user-controlled, where people decide exactly what and how much they want to share with their connections, with no third-party intervention.”
- Co-founder Jack Dillé
“One of the next significant use cases for crypto is to develop foundational social graphs for applications to leverage, and we’re excited about the blueprint being created by Icebreaker for digital trust and identity on the internet. We are proud to back Dan, Jack and their team in their mission to introduce true ownership of professional identity to everyone online.”
- Alex Felix, Chief Investment Officer, CoinFund
“Trust in digital identity is rapidly deteriorating, especially in professional networking. I can’t see a way to restore that without completely re-imagining identity and building it from the ground up with a deeply thoughtful privacy design. It’s one of the use cases I’m most excited about with crypto, and why I’m a huge supporter of Icebreaker.”
- Mike Viscuso, Co-Founder, Carbon Black and Managing Partner, Legion Capital
“I’m encouraged by this new wave of consumer startups that are implementing cryptography in a practical way. If Icebreaker can issue and maintain offchain and onchain credentials at scale, it will dramatically pull crypto adoption forward by years. I’m excited for them to continue building.”
- Dan Romero, co-founder of Web3 social network Farcaster and angel investor in Icebreaker
