San Francisco-based startup Near Protocol announced the closure of a $21.6 million funding round on Monday, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund.
Near operates as a scalable smart contract platform that has the ability to support a wide array of decentralized applications. The platform shares similarities with cloud-based infrastructure that developers already build applications on top of. Although with Near, the cloud is no longer controlled by a single company, it’s community-operated instead. The platform is backed by a public blockchain that allows for multiple developers to test, build and deploy applications at once.
“We started Near.ai with the hypothesis that we could both expand the boundaries of research in the field of program synthesis and at the same time deliver a transformative product powered by this technology,” Illia Polosukhin, CEO and co-founder of NEAR, said in a statement.
Near Protocol uses a technique called “sharding,” which splits a network into multiple pieces for parallel computing. The platform is secure enough to manage high-value assets including money and identity, according to the company.
“While there’s still lots of work to do, this means that developers can actually deploy production apps while the network gets more decentralized and is ultimately handed off completely to the community over the next several months,” Polosukhin said in a statement.
The company will use the latest round to support its MainNet platform, which launched at the end of April.
“Near MainNet allows people to deploy production applications, with user experience matching that of web applications, assets from Ethereum, and low latency,” Alex Skidanov, the startup’s CEO and co-founder, wrote in a tweet. “Any application can now launch on the network and be certain that the state and the assets they generate and the users they onboard will stay.”
The public, community-run cloud platform was founded in 2018 and has raised an estimated total of $33.7 million in venture capital to date. Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Blockchange, Libertus Capital and Distributed Global also participated in the round.
