VanEck invests $2.5 million in DAWN. The project is a DePIN that aims to create a decentralized provider of internet services. VanEck Ventures, VanEck Digital Assets Alpha and VanEck Digital Assets are the investors.
It is the first time in history that a strategic funding round has been conducted. “multiple funds at VanEck have made a direct investment into the same company,” Blockworks was the only source to hear from Blockworks. Andrena (the company behind DAWN) raised $18 Million in a previous round in August.*
Andrena CEO Neil Chatterjee said to Blockworks that DAWN is designed to capitalise on the “transformation of our lives” As 5G and Starlink are rolled out, the society will go from being fully wired to the internet into a completely wireless one.
“So now that we are kind of as a society going from a transition from a wired society to a more wireless one, we can actually use that wireless transformation in a way that we can wield it to benefit the end consumer, to benefit the end household, in a way [so they] are owning their own network. With this new transformation, we want homes to be the ones that are taking the benefit,” He clarified.
DAWN hardware is a great way to re-share the internet “no matter what provider you’re with,” Andrena explained this to Blockworks.
Chatterjee stated that his project is aimed at giving “anybody all across the globe that has underutilized bandwidth…the means to sell it without having to worry about the customer acquisition.”
The $2.5million figure will partly be used for scaling retail engagement by using the hardware. Users can create mini networks to share internet and DAWN will expand globally. The user base is primarily in the US.
Chatterjee’s team searches for the best results through that. “partnerships with data centers, internet service providers, real estate, companies, that can kind of give you a very big footprint very quickly, and then we’ll be using our capital to help expedite that deployment process.”
Onchain revenue and household numbers are the two main goals of the team. Chatterjee did not provide any specifics, but the team has been working hard to meet both goals. “millions.”
DAWN, a product offered by VanEck Ventures since October last year, is not just aesthetically pleasing. “economically competitive” There are also some challenges. “monopolistic nature” Wyatt Lonergan, Blockworks’ general partner, told Blockworks that legacy Internet service providers are still around.
This investment is in line with the philosophy of the venture fund, which involves investing up to $1,000,000 into a project at an early stage, according to Lonergan’s explanation to Empire Newsletter, published last October.
Lonergan says that DAWN aims at disrupting the monopoly of traditional ISPs, while also giving consumers more choice. “the consumer a better product, [and putting] them in control, [so the] token is kind of pouring fuel on the fire. It creates the really amazing network effects that you wouldn’t otherwise get and turns these users into owners. And that kind of strengthens the entire network, in our opinion. So I love the idea of using these mesh networks to bootstrap businesses that otherwise would be really hard to do. That is kind of the promise of tokens.”
What really attracted him and Digital Assets Alpha Fund was the team that created DAWN.
“WiFi is something, to me, that’s really easy to understand,” He explained that this pushes the project to be more mainstream. Lonergan stated that VanEck’s goal was to fund a “category-winning team,” Both funds consider DAWN to be.
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