Inrupt, a startup by Web creator, Tim Berners-Lee, secures $30million in Series A financing round. The new round was led by Forte Ventures, but the size of the deal was undisclosed.
The round saw participation from existing investors, such as Glasswing Ventures and Akamai Technologies, as well as new investors, the Minderoo Foundation’s Frontier Technology Initiative and Allstate.
Inrupt is attempting to “reshape the internet” by designing a platform that allows users to have access to their data. Cryptography expert, Bruce Schneier is part of the Inrupt team.
Barners-Lee was quoted in a statement saying, “Business transformation is disrupted by different parts of one’s life managed by different silos, with each looking after one vertical side of life.
Meanwhile, the data is utilized by the silo, leading to increasing and very reasonable public skepticism about how personal data is misused.”
Inrupt’s platform lets users store their personal data in Personal Online Datastores (POD). PODs can be decoupled bu the users whenever they choose as they are interoperable with decentralized applications.
According to an investor pitch, Inrupt believes that it is attempting to replicate the core infrastructure of companies like Visa for processing credit card and Verisign, which commercialized the DNS standard.
Principal at Forte Ventures, Hunter Hartwell, explained, that this approach enables consumers to take control of their data while giving companies, their app developers and their government, a seamless transition into a new era of the internet and regulatory regime (e.g., GDPR).
Inrupt’s customers include enterprises and governments. According to a report, the startup has reached agreements and signed contracts with the governments of Argentina, Sweden and Basque. Last year, it generated $225,000 in revenue, and $200,000 in revenue in September.
Hartwell said the funds will be deployed to broaden its global footprint of Solid deployments in both the commercial sector and the government sector.
Featured Image: Tim Berners-Lee, Founder of the World Wide Web
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