DFINITY Foundation, developing the Internet Computer, announced today that it has raised $102 million in its latest funding round. Alongside returning investors Polychain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund a16z crypto, other investors include SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital and Amino Capital.
Many DFINITY community members also participated in the latest funding round. The news comes just weeks after DFINITY conducted an airdrop of 35 million CHF worth of tokens to DFINITY community members to help them become early users of the Internet Computer.
Speaking on the announcement founder and Chief Scientist Dominic Williams said “The Internet Computer is a public infrastructure that aims to host the world’s next generation of software and services. The platform provides a novel means to develop and host new software systems where R&D costs can be 90% lower, yet hosted systems are far more secure since the Internet Computer is unhackable, and are always available, highly interoperable and better able to preserve the privacy of confidential data”.
“We are excited to back DFINITY’s Internet Computer and their vision to host the world’s next generation of software and services on a public network. The Internet Computer is on track to become a critical piece of the future technology stack. This is groundbreaking and a real testament to Dominic and the incredible team at DFINITY.” said Chris Dixon, Partner at a16z crypto.
The network also hosts a new kind of “autonomous software”, intended to support the creation of “open Internet services” that play equivalent roles to Uber, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Salesforce. These will exist as running open source software that updates itself using inbuilt governance that can provide hard guarantees to users about how their data might be used, and conversely, provide guarantees to startups wishing to build on or extend their functionality that access won’t be revoked, reducing the platform risk* new projects often face.
DFINITY has pioneered numerous technologies such as Threshold Relay and Probabilistic Slot Consensus, which allow blockchain networks to operate with far greater speed and security, and ultimately scale-out their capacity. The DFINITY network has demonstrated large testnets finalizing software computations in under 5 seconds (Bitcoin 3600, Ethereum 600), representing immense technological progress. DFINITY also builds on the crucial WebAssembly virtual machine standard for universal software co-designed by a DFINITY staff engineer, which all of the major Web browsers now support.
DFINITY has attracted the industry’s brightest minds to work on the latest and most cutting edge developments in public blockchain including Timo Hanke, the creator of AsicBoost, Ben Lynn, the “L” in BLS Cryptography, and Andreas Rossberg, co-creator of WebAssembly, among others in an extraordinarily talented team.
DFINITY is planning to continue public demonstrations of its technology through 2018, with the launch of initial public network towards the end of the year. The additional funding will help support development of the DFINITY network and related technologies and network launch.
