Nym Raises 6.5 million USD in VC Funding
First funding round proves hugely successful for Nym to build a decentralised global privacy commons
First funding round proves hugely successful for Nym to build a decentralised global privacy commons
Neuchâtel, Switzerland, July 19th, 2021. As recently reported in TechCrunch, European privacy startup Nym Technologies has received a 6.5 million USD (5.5. million EUR) round of funding from venture capital in order to build an open source and decentralised privacy network that plans to compete against closed source privacy networks such as the “privacy relay” network recently announced by Apple.
The funding round was led by Polychain Capital, and included a host of European investors such as Eden Block, Greenfield One, Maven11, Tioga, and 1kx. Will Wolf of Polychain Capital, says about leading the round, “We’re incredibly excited to partner with the Nym team to further their mission of bringing robust, sustainable and permissionless privacy infrastructure to all internet users. We believe the Nym network will provide the strongest privacy guarantees with the highest quality of service of any mixnet and thus may become a very valuable piece of core internet infrastructure.”
While the European General Data Protection Regulation relies on companies to be trusted with personal data on the threat of fines after users click their consent on a pop-up box, Nym prevents companies from harvesting data in the first place, by using cryptography and decentralisation.
Unlike traditional VPNs, Tor, or Apple’s new privacy relay network, Nym anonymises the traffic sent to any app from unwanted third parties, making it impossible to tell when or even if a user is even accessing a particular app. Even with traditional encryption and VPNs, a powerful adversary can determine “who is talking to whom, where and when” by looking at patterns in internet traffic using AI.
Compared to competitors, Nym adds a number of key features that are aimed at preventing this kind of “traffic analysis.” This is done using a mixnet and via mixing internet packets individually, similar to shuffling packets like a deck of cards. If there are not enough packets in the network at a given time, the network then adds fake traffic.
Nym’s mixing of packets is done by currently over 9,000 distributed servers across the world in it’s “Finney’” testnet, a network currently larger than even Tor in number of nodes. While VPNs and Apple force you to trust their corporate infrastructure and Tor relies on volunteers, Nym uses incentives inspired by Bitcoin to build a trustless network that aims to be an economically sustainable network.
Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies, remembers that “When our startup was first starting back in 2018, we had no interest from traditional venture capital firms, which honestly didn’t take privacy seriously at the time. The founder of Polychain, Olaf Carlson-Wee, and myself met by chance at the Web 3.0 conference in Berlin at the end of 2018, and he told me Polychain would support privacy technology — and now in 2021, we have more venture capital interest in Nym and privacy than we could fit into the Polychain-led round.”
While Nym looks like it came straight out of the Netflix series StartUp, Nym is the culmination of decades of European Commission funded research and innovation and continues to be supported by the EC as part of the European vision for privacy. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the original initiative for Nym came out of the European Commission PANORAMIX project in 2014 to build a European privacy network that could withstand even NSA mass surveillance. Now the European Commission has doubled down its bet on privacy via continuing to fund and mentor the work of Nym via POINTER and LEDGER grants as part of the Next Generation Internet grants programme.
As a former French government cryptographer with restricted ZRR clearance (zone à régime restrictif) and a former student of France’s leading philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, Nym co-founder and CEO Harry Halpin has deep roots in France. Halpin is part of the Founders Programme at Station F, the largest startup incubator in the world in Paris. Therefore, it’s natural that Nym expands in Europe, using the new round to more than double its number of employees, hiring cryptographers, developers, and communications specialists in privacy.
Lior Messika of Eden Block, who participated in the pre-seed funding of Nym and the current round, states that “for the last three years, the Nym team have been silently building one of the most ambitious privacy projects in the world. Beyond the technology involved, the team’s vision of an Open Internet enabled by privacy and data protection is too grand to disregard. The potential for Nym is to revolutionise the way our data is used and protected, with the help of a next generation of privacy infrastructure. This infrastructure will pave the way for a variety of different applications, and will form the decentralised privacy layer for Web 3.0”.
Follow the work at Nym on Telegram or Twitter @nymproject.
