Now, with a fresh $13 million capital injection, valuing the three-year old Neuchâtel, Switzerland-based company at around $270 million, Nym is gearing up to accelerate the advent of the private web powered by blockchain.
Revealed exclusively to Forbes, the Series A financing round was led by Silicon Valley monolith Andreessen Horowitz .
Following a $2.5 million seed investment led by Binance’s VC arm and incubator, in 2019, and a Polychain Capital-led $6.5 million raise, which closed this July, Nym’s latest round signals the growing interest in privacy preserving technologies, no longer a niche avail of the paranoid and the criminal.
Nym CEO Harry Halpin, who had worked at the World Wide Web Consortium with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee prior to founding the firm in 2018, says this approach, offering what he calls “network level privacy”, can defeat even nation-state level mass surveillance, unlike VPNs or the Tor network.
“We do recommend people use the Tor Browser,” Halpin notes, “but for bitcoin and Layer 2 solutions I think, we would be a better fit.” In fact, Nym has been rewarding its network node operators with bitcoin.
While not every privacy startup uses crypto, those that do have found renewed success raising capital, says Halpin, who in 2017 managed to raise only a few thousand dollars for a similar idea that didn’t use blockchain.
Since 2018, when Nym was established, funding for privacy startups has picked up: more than two thirds of the total $3.1 billion raised by companies in the field has come in the past four years, according to Crunchbase.
Among them is Nym’s cofounder George Danezis, who briefly left the project to help design Facebook’s controversial digital currency Libra when another company he cofounded, Chainspace, was acquired by the social media giant.
Last week, the team rolled out a wallet for node miners, through which they can pledge tokens to join the Nym network, earn reputation and, consequently, more tokens, based on the amount and quality of mixing the internet traffic.