Quick take:
- Fleek has announced a $25 million funding round led by Polychain Capital.
- Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Protocol Labs, Arweave, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO, and Argonautic Ventures also participated.
- Fleek is developing a protocol layer to make web3 services like storage, hosting and billing accessible to everyone.
Fleek has completed a $25 million funding round led by Polychain Capital. The Series A round also attracted participation from Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Protocol Labs, Arweave, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO, and Argonautic Ventures.
The company is building a base layer protocol that will allow anyone to gain access to web3 services like storage, hosting and billing. Fleek has identified an ecosystem gap in the web3 infrastructure stack, which it wants to address with its interface protocol layer.
“Our main initial focus is the content delivery market,” Harrison Hines, Fleek co-founder, told TechCrunch. “That’s what Fleek serves today and where we see a huge missing in the web3 infrastructure stack. It’s a problem with all web3 protocols.”
Fleek is specifically targeting the content delivery network (CDN) in web3. The company initially worked with web2 infrastructure service providers like AWS and Cloudflare but has since pivoted to web3 to offer decentralised services with web2-level scalability and performance.
The new suite of services will be offered under Fleek Network, which is set for launch in 2023.
“Our vision for Fleek Network at its core, it’s a decentralised edge network where anyone can run nodes and provide resources to the network,” Hines said. “The internet is moving to the edge now. Most of the biggest platforms are edge related.”
While several mainstream companies have forayed into web3, a lot of them seem to be focused on consumer products with very few targeting the web3 infrastructure. Data Services, in particular, remains a big gap to be filled with the nascent industry light years away from catching up with web2.
Fleet Network could help accelerate this process with its interface protocol layer that wants to mirror web2 services providers like Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare.
Fleek currency hosts about 50,000 apps on its platform. Many of those are within the Ethereum ecosystem, the world’s largest dApp network.
The company said it will use the fresh funding to build out the Fleek Network and expand its community. Fleek is also looking for new talent to add to its team.
Although Fleek’s primary goal is building its interface protocol on web3 platforms, it has a long-term target of eventually rolling out its services to web2 companies, including “gaming platforms, streaming services or any platform with a lot of traffic.”
“In this market, where big companies are looking to cut costs, we do think Fleek Network can be an attractive solution and easier jump,” added Hines.
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