Near, creators of NEAR Protocol, a developer-friendly platform for building decentralized applications, today announced the completion of an oversubscribed $12.1 million funding round led by Metastable and Accomplice; participation also included Electric Capital, Pantera Capital, and Amplify Partners.
These funds will be used to recruit more developers, accelerate the development of additional tooling, and aid in the launch of the NEAR Protocol mainnet.
Near is building critical infrastructure to support decentralized applications, including a next-generation public blockchain called NEAR Protocol.
Usability and scalability are the two primary problems that have blocked today’s smart contract platforms (such as Ethereum, EOS, and Tron) from achieving mainstream adoption. The NEAR Protocol makes decentralized applications as easy to build and use as traditional web apps while achieving global scale by using a novel sharding approach and consensus mechanism called Nightshade.
NEAR provides predictable costs for applications and gives developers tools at the protocol level that typically must be added on later, including meta transactions, contract-based accounts, and gas fee rebates. Near recently launched a beta program that provides special support to a select cohort of projects that will launch their apps with the platform later this year.
The Near team is comprised of competitive programming champions and veterans from several major tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Niantic. YC alum and CEO Alex Skidanov was the first employee at the sharded database company MemSQL and CTO Illia Polosukhin was a core contributor to Google’s TensorFlow machine learning library while working in their prestigious research division.
Moreover, the Near engineering team includes a 2-time ICPC world champion, 3 gold medalists, and multiple finalists plus the business team has deep experience building and scaling technology startups.
“Assembling a world-class development team and creating the technology is really just the first step—the next is launching a global movement that puts blockchain technology in the hands of the developers and entrepreneurs who will carry it to consumers everywhere via the apps and businesses they create.”
– Alex Skidanov, Near Co-Founder & CEO
Other investors in the round included Multicoin Capital, ACapital, Coinbase Ventures, IDEO Colab Ventures, Scalar Capital, and Ripple’s Xpring; angels included Naval Ravikant, Andrew Keys, and Balaji Srinivasan.