Huddle01, a US and India-based company that’s building the world’s first decentralized real-time communication (dRTC) network, announced today that it had raised $2.8M in Seed Round led by the leading digital asset investment firm – Hivemind, taking the company’s total raise to $4.5M till date. This round was participated by funds that include Superscrypt, M31 Capital, Protocol Labs, East Ventures, Longhash Ventures, Good News Ventures, and notable angel investors like Balaji Srinivasan, Stani Kulechov, Dan Romero and Juan Benet amongst others.
“Huddle01 is at the forefront of the video and audio communication industry, leveraging blockchain technology to make communication faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever. We’re thrilled to be part of a project that has the potential to revolutionize the way people communicate and look forward to working with Huddle01 as they move toward this vision,” said Lee Smallwood, Managing Partner at Hivemind.
Huddle01 has taken a 3-pronged approach to make audio/video communication more efficient, reliable, and secure, and that includes a video meeting platform, a/v infrastructure, and dRTC network. The platform has already clocked in 1 million+ minutes of meetings. The infrastructure (developer SDKs) has over 100 projects built on top of it. And the dRTC network will eliminate the need for centralized servers for real-time communication.
“Decentralization should be a slider and not a switch. With its demand-first approach, Huddle01 plans to create enough demand on its infrastructure to ensure that when it launches the network with incentives, it becomes self-sustaining and self-propelling with better performance, privacy and costings as compared to centralized incumbents,” says Ayush Ranjan, Co-founder, and CEO of Huddle01.
With its new round of funding, Huddle01 plans to grow its ecosystem to support thousands of apps and launch its network of nodes to facilitate communication at scale and reward them with Huddle01 tokens. Furthermore, Huddle01 will roll out grant programs to empower developers to build breakout applications on Huddle01’s infrastructure and increase their global network. Huddle01 will also tap heavily into the social, gaming, metaverse, and video commerce industry, enabling bottom-up adoption.
“We need a self-sovereign decentralized real-time communication network with incentive mechanism. To achieve that, we need to move away from client-server architecture to crypto-economic-based node-to-node architecture,” says Susmit, Co-founder, and CTO of Huddle01.
The ongoing technological developments in the field of AR & VR coupled with this generation’s natively digital habits have given way to new and advanced ways of communication. Huddle01 believes that decentralized real-time communication can not only significantly increase performance, decrease cost and increase the security of interaction but also disrupt centralized communication infrastructure in key sectors like live video commerce, social, gaming, education, and metaverse.
For more information, please read Hivemind’s blog post.
About Huddle01
The brainchild of Ayush Ranjan and Susmit Lavania, Huddle01 was co-founded at the 2020 ETHGlobal hackathon with a vision to make real-time communication open, secure, and borderless by leveraging blockchain & crypto-economics. Huddle01 has its own video meeting platform similar to Zoom that uses crypto primitives and has clocked in 1 million+ minutes of meetings. The infrastructure (developer SDKs) has over 100 projects built on top of it in categories like social, DAO tooling, education and the metaverse. Multiple web3 applications have integrated the composable Huddle01 SDKs as their video communication layer. The dRTC network will be launched by Q4 of 2023 and will eliminate the dependency on centralized servers for real-time video communication. To learn more visit, www.huddle01.com
About Hivemind
Hivemind Capital Partners (“Hivemind”) is a crypto-focused investment firm dedicated to blockchain technologies, crypto companies, and the digital assets ecosystem. Hivemind leverages a converging multi-strategy approach to create start-to-finish capital solutions for entrepreneurs and provides the category-leading infrastructure to institutionalize crypto investing.
