Amid bear market, new math startup Nillion raises over $20 million from 150+ strategic contributors

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Web3 startup Nillion has closed a fundraiser of over $20 million from strategic partners and investors. The project is based on a new mathematical innovation called Nil Message Compute (NMC) developed by cryptography professor Dr. Miguel de Vega, enabling the creation of a decentralized, non-blockchain network that aims to unlock new, non-blockchain, decentralized use cases.

Nillion’s leadership team

Since its inception in November 2021, Nillion has grown to over 40 employees without external funding. Members of the founding teams from Uber, Indiegogo, and Hedera Hashgraph, as well as key executives from Coinbase and Nike, have joined forces at Nillion to build the platform. The company aspires to become the first non-blockchain decentralized network that will enable new decentralized use cases while enabling the private and secure transmission, storage and computation of data.

Nillion CEO Alex Page reports that raising over $20 million from over 150 investors was a conscious decision to avoid typical concentrated ownership among a small number of venture capitalists who may have disincentives to invest in the long term “dumping”:

“We’ve seen so many Web3 projects suffer because their network was owned by early investors with overly concentrated holdings. This is exactly why we passed on certain Silicon Valley VCs who wanted over 5% of the tokens just to give the project their name. Instead, we carefully invited a diverse pool of early contributors who love, support, and add value to the project.”

The round was led by Distributed Global and includes investments from Big Brain Holdings, Chapter One, GSR, Hashkey, OP Crypto, SALT Fund and more than 150 others.

OP Crypto GP David Gan added:

“It’s very rare that a truly novel mathematical innovation is developed by an elite ‘Avengers-level’ team. Nillion could open up a new universe of blockchain use cases that could never have been imagined. What proof of work has done for blockchain, I believe NMC can do for multi-party computing as a technology.”

NMC enables fragmentation and distribution of data across the Nillion network of nodes, providing privacy while enabling fast computation of the underlying data. A key feature of the technology is that this process occurs without the need for inter-node communication.

According to the team, the company’s website and online materials, NMC technology unlocks new benefits in Web3, such as: B. Decentralized credit scoring, decentralized trusted execution environments, private NFTs and decentralized secure storage services. Other potential use cases promised outside of web3 include storing health records on the network while allowing analysis of the records without compromising an individual’s right to privacy.

Nil Message Compute (NMC) was founded by Dr. Miguel de Vega, Nillion’s Chief Scientist, who has authored more than 30 patents in the fields of machine learning, data optimization and mathematics. In addition to Dr. Vega’s leadership team at Nillion includes:

• Chief Technology Officer Conrad Whelan, Uber’s founding engineer.
• Head of Cryptography Dr. Elizabeth Quaglia, Lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London, one of the world’s leading institutions for cryptography.
• Chief Executive Officer Alex Page, a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs and Hedera SPV General Partner
• Director of Crypto Tristan Litré, previously CTO of a DeFi platform acquired by AQRU.
• Chief Business Officer Slava Rubin, the founder and former CEO of Indiegogo.
• Chief Strategy Officer Andrew Masanto, who launched two of the top 100 cryptocurrencies – Hedera Hashgraph and Reserve.
• Head of Ecosystem Mark McDermott, previously Lead of Innovation Partnerships at Nike.
• General Counsel Lindsay Danas Cohen, previously Associate General Counsel of Coinbase and former top legal counsel at Bloomberg.

Nillion prioritizes ecosystem development from an early stage of protocol development and reports significant interest from both Web2 and Web3 participants.

Alex Page, CEO of Nillion, said:

“We have received expressions of interest from over 120 companies looking to test applications or build on Nillion, demonstrating the need for a commercially viable private computing network. The data stored on the Nillion network is not only secure, but can also be used for extremely fast, private calculations.”

Nillion is a new Internet infrastructure for the secure storage and calculation of data. It’s a decentralized network (though not blockchain) that uses a novel mathematical innovation called Nil Message Compute (NMC), which represents a generational leap in a technology known as Secure Multiparty Computing (MPC). Nillion facilitates the fragmentation of data across a network of nodes while allowing the underlying data to be computed at commercially viable speeds.

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