Web3.0 platform Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) has raised $10.1 million in its Series A funding round from Jump Crypto at a valuation of $131 million.
Along with Jump Crypto, many more investors also invested in this round such as Tiger Global, ParaFi, A.Capital, Sino Global Capital, Polygon Studios, Woodstock Ventures, DCX Ventures, Alpha Wave Capital, Harmony Foundation, Wintermute, Zee Prime Capital, Zebpay, TRGC and iSeedVC.
The company said the Series A round comes with a lock-in period of 9-12 months for investors, and they will vest over the next 24-30 months.
The company plans to use the funds to develop notification protocols beyond the Ethereum ecosystem, starting with the Polygon Network, consolidating products, and expanding its team from 30 to 60. It also aims to grow to one million users.
EPNS was founded in 2020 by Richa Joshi and Harsh Rajat, It is building a web3 communication protocol. Their protocol enables any smart contract, decentralized application (dApp), or traditional server to send notifications related to a user’s wallet address. These notifications can be integrated and shown on any crypto wallet, mobile app, extension or dApp.
“We started with Ethereum, but the goal was always multi-chain and what we realized was because we are soul entrant in the game and because we are the creators of this, it makes sense to allow different blockchains, so we are launching on Polygon soon and the plan is to launch to at least five more blockchains and actually get million users by the end of the year”, said, Harsh Rajat, Founder of EPNS.
Along with sending and receiving push notifications, the company has now launched a mainnet – a fully fledged blockchain network – as a multi-chain protocol, enabling any type of automated communication over a decentralized network.
The company said it is betting on an evolving blockchain ecosystem as native Web 3.0 communications become essential to user experience, developer operations, investor protection, protocol architecture and more.
It also said that today the methods of communication between Web3.0 users and companies are dominated by Twitter, Discord and Telegram, giving rise to poor UX (user experience), scams and sub-communication.
This leads to issues such as smart contract version release misses, not alerting liquidation thresholds, forgetting NFT (non-fungible token) drops, and not communicating vulnerabilities well.
The firm said it is thus betting on a communications platform to provide a customized, Web3.0-native solution.
The two firms’ association goes back to when EPNS started. EPNS has an early mover advantage, offering its multichain services with free-transaction costs . EPNS has been building something unique, an essential tool to power the Web3 communications layer. Such a layer has been missing until now”, said, Sandeep Nailwal, cofounder at Polygon.
It is also working with over 80 projects including Uniswap, Aragon, Notional Finance, mStable, Snapshot, Decentraland, MakerDAO, Gitcoin, Polygon, ENS, Dydx, Bancor, Defiant, Coindesk among others.
About EPNS :
Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) is a Notification Protocol that enables users (Wallet Addresses) to receive notifications. Using the protocol, any dApp, service, or smart contract can send notifications to users(wallet addresses) in a platform agnostic way (mobile, tablet, web, fav. Wallets, etc). The DeFi aspect of the protocol also ensures that the user receives token incentives from those notifications.
