Nym’s Innovation Fund to invest $300 million in creating a privacy-enhanced Internet

Nym Technologies SA has just announced a 300 million USD in commitments from venture capital partners who are doubling-down on privacy and NYM. Venture partners for the new NYM Innovation Fund include Polychain, Greenfield One, Huobi Incubator, Tioga Capital, Eden Block, NGC Ventures, Haskey Capital, Figment, Fenbushi Capital, OKX Blockdream Ventures, Tayssir Capital, KR1, Lemniscap, and a16zcrypto. The VCs backing the fund are looking to have an increased portfolio in privacy companies building on top of Nym. “In general, there is an interest in funding more privacy technology by cutting-edge venture firms looking for business models outside the monopolies of Silicon Valley, and this holds true both for traditional firms like a16z as well as European firms like Greenfield One in Germany”, explains Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies to Startupticker.ch

This NYM Innovation fund has as advisors George Danezis (ex-Meta, now Mysten Labs), Aggelos Kiayias (IO Global and University of Edinburgh), Ben Laurie (Google), and Bart Preneel (KU Leuven). A Nym Foundation has also been created, and an open call for proposals will be announced to the community at the end of May. The grants will be released quarterly.

Four initial grants had awarded. These are unrestricted gifts except for Nymbox, which is a directed development project. The four initially selected projects to support are:

1. Carmela Troncoso (EPFL), co-inventor of privacy-enhanced COVID contract tracing DP3T framework and critic of COVID passports. She is one of the foremost experts in privacy engineering and mixnets, and recently held a discussion with Nym's Chelsea Manning in March called the "Future of Privacy and Data in Wartime" at EPFL. 
2. Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois), co-inventor of Curve 25519 and other high-speed modern crypto primitives. Critic of NSA interference in crypto standards,he took on the US government in the Bernstein v. US court case, which recognized software publication as free speech. He will be working on speeding up our packet format, Sphinx, the same packet format used by the Lightning Network
3. Tails: The software used by Edward Snowden when leaking NSA secrets, an easy to use bootable Linux distribution with the highest possible privacy and security today. It includes Tor and the Electrum Bitcoin wallet.
4. Nymbox (Pacific Northwest Rural Broadband Alliance) : A community-driven OpenWRT package of the Nym gateway software that  firmware image that can be flashed on to any compatible 32bit or 64bit ARM-based home or portable routers (from manufacturers like Linksys routers), or single board computer (like a Raspberry PI), with mesh networking support planned.

While the community is always in fear of early backers of Nym "dumping" their tokens at earliest opportunity, the backers of Nym are doing the reverse: Everyone from seed supporters to Polychain are doubling down. One investor in Nym's previous seed round, Lior Messika, Founder and Managing Partner at Eden Block, said "I've been having some really interesting conversations with a bunch of scientists and builders about what could potentially be built on top of Nym. Knowing the ins and outs of the technology and the infrastructure Nym is creating has always kept me super interested in the possible applications powered by NYM. Basically, timing could not have been better."

Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies, stated "While this fund may seem large, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the endless amounts of cash possessed by vested interests at Silicon Valley companies and nation-states that benefit from mass surveillance. However, we're going to fight the good fight and the odds may not be as impossible as they seem. We have new partners that are waiting in the wings to join the fund that we can't even announce in this initial fund. I'm just thrilled that developers now can finally get paid for building privacy-enhancing technologies."

(Press release / SK)
Picture: Nym Technologies SA