Nebulous, the company building the Sia decentralized cloud storage platform and the Skynet application hosting platform, today announced it has closed a $3M funding round led by Paradigm with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, A.Capital, Collaborative Fund, Dragonfly Capital Partners, Hack VC, INBlockchain, First Star Ventures, and other notable investors. The round will help the company scale and accelerate the development and adoption of Skynet.
Today’s internet monopolized by tech giants struggles with fundamental challenges in privacy, reliability, and has excessive control over our data and the way we interact with the world. Skynet enables high speed, low cost, and superior infrastructure to serve as the storage foundation for a free Internet. Where data is globally accessible, user-controlled, censorship-resistant, and not fragmented in walled gardens.
Skynet empowers developers to deploy applications to a decentralized network in just minutes and be immediately available to everyone across the world. Importantly, end-users can directly access content on Skynet without needing to run full nodes or deal with cryptocurrencies. It paves the path for more powerful applications, more dynamic user experiences, and disintermediates the web to ensure that publishers and creators are paid the full amount that they deserve. Skynet enables the decentralized web ecosystem to realize the full potential of a free internet.
“The possibilities created by Skynet blow our minds. The project has enabled a growing ecosystem of builders to quickly prototype censorship-resistant applications and interactive websites including interfaces to Ethereum smart contracts like Uniswap,” said Dan Robinson, Research Partner at Paradigm. “We’re investing in the Skynet team because we believe they have the right combination of talent, experience, and community to shepherd us into the era of the Decentralized Web.”
Nebulous launched the Skynet platform back in February 2020 and since then has seen accelerated growth in developer interest and usage. More than 1.6 million files have been uploaded and shared amounting to 10+ TB of data using Skynet. A thriving community of developers has built over 100 applications in the span of a few months including a Video Streaming app SkyLive, Blogging apps like Wakio and Skyblog Builder, Video & Image gallery app SkyGallery, and a Decentralized AppStore Skydroid. The full list of Skynet Apps can be explored at the Skynet AppStore. We believe the next generation of Twitter, Medium, TikTok will be built on Skynet.
By building on the Sia network, Skynet delivers a 10x reduction in storage costs and a 100x reduction in bandwidth costs when compared to centralized providers, without sacrificing performance or reliability. Skynet achieves 1 gigabit per second in download and uploads speeds, with more improvements coming in future releases.
“For the first time, the decentralized web feels within reach. We’re not talking about a web that is technically feasible yet crippled compared to the centralized alternatives, we are talking about a decentralized web that will become an unstoppable force” said David Vorick, Nebulous CEO and Skynet Lead Developer. “Ten years from now, using centralized applications instead of decentralized applications will feel like using a fax machine instead of email.”
In addition to the funding news, Nebulous is announcing its rebranding to Skynet to solely focused on developing and growing the Skynet ecosystem. Next-generation applications are already being built on Skynet with more developers joining the community every day. Skynet is different from any platform or technology than has ever been built before. Because of that, we are thrilled to be doubling down on what we know will become the future of the Internet.