- Near — a San Francisco, California-based developer-friendly platform for building decentralized applications — announced it raised $12.1 million.
San Francisco, California-based Near is a developer-friendly platform for building decentralized applications that announced it raised $12.1 million. This round of funding was oversubscribed.
This round of funding was led by Metastable and Accomplice. And Electric Capital, Pantera Capital, Amplify Partners, Multicoin Capital, ACapital, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO Colab Ventures, Scalar Capital, Ripple’s Xpring, Naval Ravikant, Andrew Keys, and Balaji Srinivasan also joined the round.
Headed by CEO Alex Skidanov and CTO Illia Polosukhin, Near is planning to use the funding to recruit developers, accelerate the development of additional tooling, and launching the NEAR Protocol mainnet.
“The Near team is focused on building developer tools and creating an ecosystem that is inclusive of developers, designers, and business development backgrounds, which differentiates them from most other projects in the space,” explained Pantera partner Paul Veradittakit via Coindesk.
Near is also building critical infrastructure to support decentralized applications, including a next-generation public blockchain called NEAR Protocol. The NEAR Protocol is a proof-of-stake blockchain — which uses a technique called “sharding” that splits a network into multiple pieces so that the computation is being done in parallel.
“We believe that Near’s developer-friendly proof-of-stake protocol will usher in a new wave of decentralized applications and give power back to end users,” said Ash Egan of Accomplice. “Assembling a world-class development team and creating the technology is really just the first step – the next is launching a global movement that puts blockchain technology in the hands of the developers and entrepreneurs who will carry it to consumers everywhere via the apps and businesses they create.”
Recently, the Near team launched a beta program that provides special support to a select cohort of projects that will launch their apps with the platform later this year.
“The Near team is a rare combination of engineers who are both theoretically deep and also extremely pragmatic,” explained Avichal Garg — General Partner at Electric Capital. “They are one of the few teams to have previously shipped a sharded, distributed system used at scale and are one of the best executing teams in crypto and blockchain. We are thrilled to be partnering with them and excited to see NEAR become one of the leading, public blockchains.”
