Announcing our $8M seed round
We’ve raised an $8M Seed round, led by Sequoia and BlueYard Capital, to help you protect user data in web3
Henri Stern
|Apr 20, 2022
Today, we’re excited to announce the latest milestone for Privy: we’ve raised $8.3M in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital and BlueYard Capital. This funding will help us grow our team, scale our APIs and build partnerships to help developers in the space build better, more private products for their users.
The Round.
We’re so thankful to our backers including Electric Capital, Archetype, BoxGroup, Protocol Labs, as well as amazing builders responsible for some of the best products in web2 and web3 like Aaron Henshaw and Joe Lallouz (Bison Trails), Juan Benet, Molly Mackinlay, Jesse Clayburgh (Protocol Labs), Brad Burnham (USV, Placeholder), Jutta Steiner (Parity, Ethereum), Diogo Monica (Anchorage), Sina Habibian (Ethereum Foundation), Ben Fisch (Espresso Systems), Colfax Selby (GitPoap), John Zannos and Alex Lange (Inflection Capital), Pamir Gelenbe, Eli Turlington and Barron Jeter (Libertus Capital), Sabrina Hahn, Aaron Harris, Ali Rowghani (YC), Nicolas Chinot, Romain Huet, Keith Adams, Ela Madej and Chris Waclawek (50Y), Garry Tan (Initialized), Chad Byers (Susa), Kevin Zhang (Bain Crypto), Nicholas Chirls (Notation), Charlie Songhurst, Kent Beck, Thomas Bailey, anons, and many others!
Why Privy?
Over 300 million people own crypto today, DeFi has $100Bn TVL, Bored Apes have gone viral. Whether you like it or not, you can’t miss crypto (we like it :D).
However, even as the space stands to reshape much of the Internet, finance and our culture, this broader adoption of crypto puts developers building in web3 in a challenging position. More users means more data. More data, more problems.
Personal data today comes with regulatory overhead, breaches and deep misalignment with users — and most developers don’t want to get near it. Yet, without user data, we are flying blind, forced to build for wallets rather than people, with no real insight into our users behind the usage we see on-chain.
And the seams show. The lack of user data in web3 has resulted in terrible user experiences for those accustomed to the modern web. Things like the inability to get an email when you’re about to get liquidated, or the need to keep signing in and out of dapps to see activity across wallets. You shouldn’t have to mine your users’ data or put your users at risk to ship great products.
Developers are busy enough trying to ship brilliant products without having to think through reinventing the data stack. We need better tooling to manage user data privately in web3.
Enter Privy.
Privy builds simple, powerful APIs to manage user data so you can integrate user data into your product easily. Privy helps you bridge the gap between users’ on-chain activity and their off-chain data so you can build delightful experiences without putting your users or product at risk. With privy.put() and privy.get(), encrypt user data directly from your front-end, and privately associate data to on-chain addresses. This enables you to:
Text or email users without handling their personal information directly
Take on financial and compliance data without storing it on your stack
Surface a unified UI across wallets and across chains without doxxing your users
This is just the beginning. The next generation of data tooling should keep users in the loop and in control of their data across the web. As web3 matures, we see an opportunity to reinvent the data paradigms that have failed us over the last 30 years and give users back control over their data online. We’re so excited to be building with you all!
In case you were wondering, we are hiring ;).
If the opportunity to help reinvent the data stack online is as exciting to you as it is to us, we’d love to speak with you. To get started using our APIs or learn more about Privy, request an API key here or follow us on Twitter. We can’t wait to share more with you soon.
The next generation of data tooling should keep users in the loop and in control of their data across the web. With that, back to work!
The Privy founders
