Web3 startup Nillion raises $20 million for non-blockchain decentralized network
Nillion, a Web3 startup building decentralized non-blockchain networks, announced today that it has raised $20 million in an oversubscribed round led by Distributed Global to focus on its peer-to-peer storage and computing technology.
The startup is building infrastructure for decentralized peer-to-peer networks that allow truly decentralized processing by mathematically sectionalizing data into nodes so that they can be computed simultaneously without the nodes being aware of the entire dataset. Nillion’s cryptographic technology is known as Nil Message Compute and provides nodes with a permissionless, decentralized network with security and privacy.
Unlike blockchain computing, it does not require distributed ledgers that fully replicate all the data, and all computation does not require all computation to occur on a single node. As a result, security and privacy can be achieved, and the nodes themselves are “blind” to the entire data set and are only aware of the small part of data that has been handed to them to compute.
An important feature of the technology is that it does not involve communication between the nodes. Once a node has finished transforming the data it has been handed, it can be reconstituted into the entire data set by the original processor without the nodes knowledge. This provides an extra layer of security.
The mathematical model for Nillion’s technology was developed by the company’s chief scientist, Miguel de Vega. In addition to Vega, the company has built a team of more than 40 since its founding in November 2021, including the core engineer from Uber and former employees from Hedera Hashgraph and Coinbase.
The company’s team said the technology has applications for decentralized credit scoring, decentralized trusted execution environments, private non-fungible tokens and decentralized secure storage services. Other potential use cases could provide solutions for health records or other situations where user records on the network required analysis, but needed increased security to avoid compromising privacy.
Nillion is currently prioritizing the development of its ecosystem development from this early stage of its protocol development and has seen significant interest from both traditional Web 2.0 companies and Web3 companies.
“We’ve had expressions of interest from over 120 companies looking to test applications or build on Nillion, demonstrating the need for a commercially viable private data network,” said Nillion CEO Alex Page. “Data stored on the Nillion network is not only secure, but it can be used for extremely fast, private calculations.”
In addition to funding from Distributed Global, the round included investments from Big Brain Holdings, Chapter One, GSR, Hashkey, OP Crypto, Salt Fund and more than 150 other investors. Page mentioned that targeting so many investors was a conscious decision by the company to avoid “overly concentrated ownership” and thus have a small number of venture capitalists to “dump” the company in the long term.
“It’s very rare to have a truly new mathematical innovation being built by an elite Avengers-level team,” said David Gan, General Partner at OP Crypto. “Nillion can open up a new universe of use cases that blockchain never imagined. What proof of work did for blockchain, I think NMC can do for multiparty computing as a technology.”
