Beacon Fund, a dedicated crypto fund by Polychain Capital focused on growing the DFINITY Internet Computer, announced it has led a $1.5 million round in Capsule, a decentralized social media platform.
This adds to the pre-seed investment of $100,000 coming from angel investors including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, William J. Pulte, and Wamda Capital. The funds will be used to build out the team, get a prototype of the product up and running, as well as launch mobile applications.
Last September, Polychain Capital publicly debuted its Beacon fund — a $14.5 million investment vehicle funded by Polychain, Andreessen Horowitz, and the DFINITY Foundation.
The Fund has focused on entrepreneurs and teams building on the Internet Computer — a blockchain computer that runs at web speed with infinite capacity.
Capsule Founder Nadim Kobeissi has expressed concern about giant private corporations having unilateral power to shape internet speech — whether takedown decisions are being made by Twitter’s trust and safety lead or Amazon Web Services revoking access to the public internet.
“I am delighted with the extremely fast response in both backers and believers in what we are trying to achieve. It speaks to the concerns of many creators and free speech advocates. We are aiming to create decentralized discourse in a world where we believe it is badly needed.”
– Nadim Kobeissi, Founder of Capsule
The Internet Computer, DFINITY’s public compute platform, aims to allow decentralized services like Capsule to return to an era of permissionless innovation, which gave rise to Netscape, Napster, eBay, Google, Amazon.com, etc, before the monopolization of the internet and proliferation of proprietary, insecure server farms and platforms controlled by Big Tech.
