Switzerland-based privacy start-up Nym Technologies has raised $6 million, which is being loosely pegged as a Series A round.
Earlier raises included a $2.5 million seed round in 2019. The founders also took in grant money from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research fund throughout an earlier R&D phase establishing the network tech.
The latest financing will be used to continue business advancement of network facilities, which integrates an old concept for obfuscating the metadata of data packets at the transport network layer (Mixnets) with a crypto inspired reputation and reward system to drive the required quality of service and support a resilient, decentralized facilities.
Nym’s pitch is it’s developing “an open-ended confidential overlay network that works to irreversibly camouflage patterns in Internet traffic”.
Unsurprisingly, provided its attention to crypto mechanics, financiers in the Series A have strong crypto ties — — and cryptocurrency-related use cases are also where Nym expects its very first users to come from — with the round led by Polychain Capital, with involvement from a variety of smaller sized European financiers including Eden Block, Greenfield One, Maven11, Tioga and 1kx. Commenting in a declaration, Will Wolf of Polychain Capital, stated: “We’re incredibly delighted to partner with the Nym group to further their mission of bringing robust, permissionless and sustainable personal privacy facilities to all Internet users. We believe the Nym network will provide the greatest personal privacy warranties with the greatest quality of service of any mixnet and thus may end up being an extremely important piece of core web facilities.”The internet’s “original sin”was that core infrastructure wasn’t
designed with personal privacy in mind. Therefore the level of complicity associated with Mixnets — shuffling and delaying encrypted data packages in order to protect sender-to-recipient metadata from adversaries with a worldwide view of a network — most likely looked like over-engineering all the way back when the web’s scaffolding was being pieced together. But then came Bitcoin and the crypto boom and — likewise in 2013 — the Snowden
revelations, which ripped the veil off the NSA’s — “collect it all — “mantra, as Booz Allen Hamilton sub-contractor Ed risked it all to discard information on his own(and other)governments’mass monitoring programs. Unexpectedly network level enemies were front page news. Therefore was internet privacy. Because Snowden’s big expose, there’s been a slow burn of momentum for personal privacy tech — with increasing consumer awareness fuelling use of services like E2E encrypted email and messaging apps. Sometimes in spurts and — spikes, associated to specific data breaches and scandals. Or indeed privacy-hostile policy modifications by mainstream tech giants(hi Facebook!.?.!! ). Signal’s Brian Acton discusses exploding development, monetization and WhatsApp data-sharing outrageArticle curated by RJ Shara from Source. RJ Shara is a Bay Area Radio Host (Radio Jockey) who talks about the startup ecosystem – entrepreneurs, investments, policies and more on her show The Silicon Dreams. The show streams on Radio Zindagi 1170AM on Mondays from 3.30 PM to 4 PM.
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