Web3 developer platform Fleek has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Polychain Capital, the company shared exclusively with businessroundups.org.
Other investors in the round include Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Protocol Labs, Arweave, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO, and Argonautic Ventures.
The startup aims to build an interface and protocol layer “to make the basic layer of the web[3] services” such as storage, hosting and billing, accessible to everyone, she said website.
“Our main initial focus is the content delivery market,” Harrison Hines, co-founder of Fleek, told businessroundups.org. “That’s what Fleek serves today and what we see a huge lack of in the web3 infrastructure stack. It is a problem with all web3 protocols.”
The content delivery (CDM) market is dominated by a few big players like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare, to name a few, Hines said. And while Fleek originally partnered with Web 2.0 infrastructure providers like AWS and Cloudflare, it plans to launch its own Fleek network in 2023 and offer Web3 technologies like decentralization while still achieving Web 2.0-like performance, Hines added.
“Our vision for Fleek Network is, at its core, a decentralized edge network where anyone can run nodes and provide resources to the network,” said Hines. “The internet is now going to the brink. Most of the biggest platforms are edge related.”
Hines defines the edge as moving content from one central server location to moving a loose coupling of disparate infrastructure and cloud services closer to the end user.
Fleek currently hosts about 50,000 apps on its platform, mostly within the Ethereum ecosystem, but also among other protocols, Hines noted. To date, all Fleek products are built on crypto protocols such as Ethereum, Filecoin, Internet Computer, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and Textile.
The new capital will be used to build out the Fleek network and platform while attracting additional talent and growing the community, Hines said.
The startup will first focus on building out in the web3 ecosystem, but will later expand into Web 2.0 businesses such as video game platforms, streaming services or any high-traffic platform, which tends to be one of their biggest cost drivers, Hines said. “In this market, where large companies are looking to cut costs, we think Fleek Network could be an attractive and more convenient solution.”
Pricing on Fleek is “fluid so the stats can adjust as it grows,” Hines said, but compared to Cloudflare, which charges about 5 to 15 cents per gigabyte for bandwidth, Fleek aims to stay under a cent per gigabyte. remain, making it five to fifteen times cheaper.
“We have been trying this for years and there is a breakthrough in it [the crypto ecosystem for] scalability and how we can actually build these networks that gave us confidence that we can do it and align with the scale, throughput and latency of existing web2 systems,” Hines said. “It was perfect timing.”
