Web3 developer platform Fleek has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Polychain Capital, the corporate shared solely with Thealike.
Additional buyers within the spherical embody Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Protocol Labs, Arweave, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO, and Argonautic Ventures.
The startup is aiming to construct an interface and protocol layer “to make the base layer of web[3] services” like storage, internet hosting and billing, accessible to anybody, in accordance with its website.
“Our main initial focus is the content delivery market,” Harrison Hines, Fleek co-founder, mentioned to Thealike. “That’s what Fleek serves today and where we see a huge missing in the web3 infrastructure stack. It’s a problem with all web3 protocols.”
The content material supply market (CDM) is dominated by a couple of massive gamers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare, to call a couple of, Hines mentioned. And whereas Fleek initially labored with Web 2.0 infrastructure suppliers like AWS and Cloudflare, it plans to launch its personal Fleek Network in 2023 and supply web3 applied sciences like decentralization, whereas nonetheless attaining Web 2.0-like efficiency, Hines added.
“Our vision for Fleek Network at its core, it’s a decentralized edge network where anyone can run nodes and provide resources to the network,” Hines mentioned. “The internet is moving to the edge now. Most of the biggest platforms are edge related.”
Hines defines the sting as shifting content material away from one central server location to shifting a unfastened coupling of various infrastructure and cloud providers nearer to the top consumer.
Fleek hosts about 50,000 apps on its platform at present, primarily inside the Ethereum ecosystem, but in addition amongst different protocols, too, Hines famous. To date, all Fleek merchandise are constructed on crypto protocols like Ethereum, Filecoin, Internet Computer, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Textile.
The contemporary capital can be used to construct out the Fleek Network and platform, whereas bringing on further expertise and rising its neighborhood, Hines mentioned.
The startup will concentrate on constructing out within the web3 ecosystem first, however will later broaden to Web 2.0 firms like video gaming platforms, streaming providers or any platform with plenty of site visitors, which is often considered one of their largest prices, Hines mentioned. “In this market, where big companies are looking to cut costs, we do think Fleek Network can be an attractive solution and easier jump.”
The pricing on Fleek is “fluid so the metrics can be adjusted as it grows,” Hines mentioned, however in comparison with Cloudflare, which costs about 5 to fifteen cents per gigabyte of bandwidth, Fleek goals to stay beneath a penny per gigabyte, making it 5 to fifteen occasions inexpensive.
“We’ve been trying to do this for years and there’s been a breakthrough in [the crypto ecosystem for] scalability and how to actually build these networks that gave us the confidence that we can do it and is on par with the scale, throughput and latency of existing web2 systems,” Hines mentioned. “It was the perfect timing.”
