![]() ![]() “But by the end of the day - last Sunday, eight days ago - I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10 million with $100,000 in pre-seed funding, which is insane. I’ve been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services,” he continues. Instead the tweet “just completely exploded” and he found himself raising $100,000 “in a single day” - with $50,000 paid in there and then. “I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I’ll set up a Kickstarter,” he tells us. But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept. The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10 million, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype - hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1 million-$1.5 million) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps.įor now there’s nothing to see beyond Capsule’s landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). It will be lightweight, user friendly and secure.Īre you interested in funding its development? These then connect to one another in a mesh, allowing following and sharing posts. “Capsule may be a social media service but its relationship with its users and developers will be fundamentally different than Big Tech platforms.”īelow are a few screenshots showing current mock-ups of the Capsule interface.I’m designing a decentralized social media solution where each user hosts their own microservice. “Ultimately, I think that Capsule will be to Facebook what healthy, vegetarian diets are to a McDonald’s diet,” he adds more generally of his intent for the service. “Others may use the same technology but I think we can do a good job on building something simple that just works and that is a pleasure to use.” ![]() “We think Capsule’s value will lie in its exceptional user experience, quality, performance, ease of use and high quality engineering that draws on advanced technologies such as TIC and IPFS without saddling bloat,” he says. if/when there’s a sea of decentralized ‘mega-apps’ that can also claim resilience to censorship? Where, then, does Kobeissi see Capsule’s USP - i.e. ![]() So there could soon be a bunch of apps built atop its network touting social networking services without the meddling hand of Big Tech. It went on to demo a TikTok clone - and to open TIC up to outside developers last summer. Last year, for example, Dfinity launched a proof of concept for an ‘open’ version of the professional social network, LinkedIn - which it punningly called ‘LinkedUp’. Given the intent with TIC is to hosts all sorts of decentralized apps it’s possible - indeed, likely - that a bunch of decentralized social media plays will emerge. “The rest will still be a self-hosting, self-contained, precisely engineered micro-services concept, with IPFS (previously GUN) as a decentralized database/connectivity back-end,” he adds. ![]() “We were looking to solve these issues somehow before this investment and were already considering Dfinity as the potential solution given that it has a programming language that allows for building these ‘custom mini-blockchains’ as we see them.” “The Internet Computer will hopefully be helping us build a ‘customized mini-blockchain’ to solve two issues with Capsule: Global authenticated timestamps for posts as well as a root of trust for user’s authentication keys for posts,” he says. He says that hasn’t changed - but sees potential for TIC to help solve some specific technical issues. Kobeissi’s original concept for Capsule, meanwhile, was to create self-hosting microservices. We could launch an MVP now but are choosing to hold off by a few weeks.” “We’re investigating switching some of the infrastructure from GUN to IPFS, and improving the user interface. “The prototype is ready,” he tells TechCrunch. Mobile apps are also on the cards and the funding will be used to build out Capsule’s team as well (currently it’s around four people).Ĭapsule founder Nadim Kobeissi, a cryptography researcher who previously authored the open-source E2E-encrypted desktop chat app Cryptocat, says they’re on track to put out an MVP this month - once they’ve made a few tweaks to the infrastructure. That’s now been topped up with seed financing to get a prototype to market later this month. Capsule‘s plan to launch a super simple decentralized social media platform which is safe from censorship by Big Tech has advanced another stage: The nascent startup has closed a seed round of funding ($1.5M) led by Beacon Fund, a dedicated crypto fund by Polychain Capital - which is itself focused on startups building on Dfinity’s decentralized network for next-gen ‘open’ apps (aka, the Internet Computer).Īs we reported in January, the idea for Capsule started with a tweet that almost immediately pulled in a pre-seed raise of $100k. ![]()
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