According to a source familiar with the situation, Tim Berners-firm, Lee’s Inrupt, has secured roughly $30 million in its Series a funding round. Forte Ventures led Inrupt’s fresh round, the two companies stated on Thursday, but neither would reveal the value of the investment. “All previous investors,” such as Akamai Technologies and Glasswing Ventures, as well as new investors Allstate and the Minderoo Foundation’s Frontier Technology Initiative participated in the round. In late October, reported that Inrupt, a three-year-old startup, was in discussions to fund $30 million to $50 million.
Inrupt, created by Tim Berners-Lee, the developer of the web’s standards, and John Bruce, a technologist, is seeking to “reshape the internet” by developing a platform that offers consumers control over their data. Bruce Schneier, a cryptography specialist, is part of the Inrupt team. “Business change is inhibited by multiple silos managing different aspects of one’s life, each of which looks after one vertical slice of life,” Berners-Lee said in a statement. “In the meantime, the silo in issue exploits that data, leading to growing, quite legitimate public suspicion about how personal data is handled.”
Inrupt’s software allows users to save their personal information in a POD (Personal Online Datastores). These PODs are compatible with decentrealized applications and may be detached at any time by the user. Inrupt claims it is seeking to duplicate the basic infrastructure of firms such as Visa for credit card processing and Verisign, which commercialized the DNS standard, according to an investor pitch acquired by. In a blog post, Hunter Hartwell, principal at Forte Ventures, stated, “This strategy allows customers to take ownership of their data while providing governments and corporations — and their app developers — a more smooth transition into a new internet era and legal regime (e.g., GDPR).”
“Our investment thesis for Inrupt is simple: consumers, governments, and many businesses want to migrate to a genuinely open and collaborative online (aka Web3), and Inrupt’s enterprise Solid server (ESS) is the most technically advanced and financially feasible approach to achieving that goal.” The conviction that this top-tier team is uniquely prepared to satisfy the requirements and expectations of government and business partners, as well as the general public, is embedded in our thesis,” he said.
Governments and businesses are among Inrupt’s clients. According to, the business has negotiated contracts with the governments of Sweden, Argentina, and Basque. According to the study, it made $225,000 in sales last year and $200,000 in September. According to Hartwell, the funds will be used to “expand its global footprint of Solid deployments in both the government and commercial sectors.”
