[Funding alert] Puerto Rico-based Tea raises $8M sponsored by Binance Labs

Puerto Rico-based startup Tea announced that it has raised $8 million in a seed round led by crypto exchange Binance. The company intends to create open-source software on blockchain to assist its developers.

Other participants in the funding round include XBTO, Lattice Capital, Darma Capital, Coral Capital, Woodstock, Rocktree, SVK, and MAKE services.

Co-founder Timothy Lewis said, "We’re not changing the nature of the open-source. It’s still free, software wants to be free, but programmers need to be compensated."

"We’re bringing the creator economy to open source. Our vision is to fix how open source is funded and create the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity,” he added.

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs, said, “We are excited to support Max, Tim, and team, as part of our overall investment push into the infrastructure levers that shift Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. We believe the Tea team has the potential to introduce new paradigms that allow open source compensation without direct payment."

"The platform can solve a core problem for the open-source software development community by utilising of the key value proposition of decentralised token economies,” he added.

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Here are some of the highlights about what Tea plans to do:

• Tea plans to include a slashing mechanism and enable handing over the control of a project from one developer to another. After the completion of the project, the software would create a new security layer and will inform both users and owners if something in its stack is broken.

• Members of the Tea ecosystem are offered the choice to reward developers by purchasing utility tokens connected with each project and this enables them access to better deals with the project's developers.

• The governance tokens will be accessible to developers while using the platform, and the company also provides open-source graphs and supports modern digital infrastructure. The packages will be launched as NFTs on the blockchain.

• Tea's decentralisation has a direct impact on the security of the ecosystem and every layer of apps and dapps are signed and authenticated on-chain. The company intends to use the amount raised to recruit additional resources to strengthen its protocol, software, and community development.