India and US-based video conferencing platform Huddle01, which is building a decentralised real-time communication (dRTC) network raised $2.8 million in seed from blockchain investment firm Hivemind where other investors such as Temasek’s Web3 arm Superscrypt, M31 Capital, Protocol Labs, East Ventures, Longhash Ventures, Good News Ventures, and some angel investors also participated.
Huddle01 intends to use the new funds to expand its ecosystem to support dApps and to launch a network of nodes to facilitate communication. Huddle01 will also launch grant programmes to enable developers to build apps on Huddle01’s infrastructure.
Huddle01 asserts that it will use blockchain technology to enable real-time communication. According to the startup, it has held over one million meetings.
Huddle01 revealed that its infrastructure (developer SDKs) has been used by over 100 projects, and that the dRTC network will eliminate the need for centralised servers for real-time communication.
Ayush Ranjan, cofounder and CEO of Huddle01, elaborated on the startup’s goals, saying, “Decentralisation should be a slider, not a switch.” Huddle01 plans to create enough demand on its infrastructure with its demand-first approach to ensure that when it launches the network with incentives, it becomes self-sustaining and self-propelling with better performance, privacy, and costs than centralised incumbents.”
“We need a self-sovereign decentralised real-time communication network with an incentive mechanism,” said Lavania, who is also the CTO of Huddle01. To do so, we must abandon client-server architecture in favour of node-to-node cryptoeconomic architecture.”
