Inrupt, website creator Tim Berners-Lee, raises $ 30 million – TechCrunch
Tim Berners-Lee’s startup Inrupt has raised around $ 30 million in its Series A funding round, a source familiar with the matter said.
Forte Ventures led the new cycle of Interrupt, both Thursdays said, but both declined to disclose the size of the deal. The cycle saw the participation of “all existing investors,” including Akamai Technologies and Glasswing Ventures, as well as new investors Allstate and Frontier Technology Initiative from the Minderoo Foundation.
TechCrunch reported in late October that the three-year-old Interrupt was in talks to raise between $ 30 million and $ 50 million.
Inrupt – founded by the creator of World Wide Web standards, Berners-Lee, and technologist John Bruce – is attempting to “reshape the Internet” by creating a platform that gives users control over their data. The Inrupt team includes crypto expert Bruce Schneier.
“Business transformation is hampered by the fact that different parts of life are run by different silos, each dealing with a vertical slice of life,” Berners-Lee said in a statement. “Meanwhile, this data is being mined by the silo in question, leading to growing and very reasonable public skepticism about how personal data is being misused. “
Interrupt’s platform allows users to store their personal data in what is known as a POD (Personal Online Datastores). These PODs are interoperable with decentralized applications and can be decoupled whenever the user wishes. Inrupt believes, he said in an investor pitch obtained by TechCrunch, that he is trying to emulate the core infrastructure of companies such as Visa for credit card processing and Verisign, which marketed the DNS standard.
“This approach allows consumers to take control of their data while providing governments and businesses – and their application developers – with a more seamless transition to a new internet age and new regulatory regime (for example, GDPR) “, wrote Hunter Hartwell, director of Forte Ventures, in a blog post.
“Our thesis for investing in Inrupt is simple: Consumers, governments, and many businesses are eager to move towards a truly open and collaborative web (aka Web3), and Enterprise Solid Server (ESS). Inrupt represents the most advanced server and the most technically viable commercially viable route to achieving this future. Our thesis is rooted in the conviction that this leading team is particularly qualified to meet the requirements and expectations of government and commercial partners, as well as the general public, ”he added.
Interrupt’s clients include governments and corporations. The startup has signed contracts with the Swedish, Argentinian and Basque governments, TechCrunch reported earlier. It generated $ 225,000 in revenue last year and $ 200,000 in revenue in September, according to the report.
The startup will deploy the funds to “expand its global footprint of strong deployments in both government and commercial sectors,” Hartwell said.
