Hivemind, Balaji Srinivasan, others back decentralised communication project Huddle01

Web3-based video meeting and real-time communication platform Huddle01 has raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by Hivemind, with participation from Superscrypt, M31 Capital, Protocol Labs, East Ventures, Longhash Ventures, and Good News Ventures.

Notable angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Stani Kulechov, Dan Romero, and Juan Benet have also backed the startup's seed round. The company's total funds raised now stands at $4.5 million.

Huddle01 is a decentralised video conferencing platform that enables synchronous and asynchronous communication for wallets, dApps, DAOs, communities, and users for free. It also gives users access to secure, real-time communication through a toolkit for communication.

It had previously raised a pre-seed round from Protocol Labs and Web3 angel investors such as Sandeep Nailwal, Preethi Kasireddy, and more.

“With its demand-first approach, we at Huddle01 plan to create enough demand on our infrastructure to ensure that when we launch our network with incentives, it becomes self-sustaining and self-propelling with better performance, privacy, and costings as compared to centralised incumbents,” said Ayush Ranjan, Co-founder and CEO, Huddle01, in a statement.

The startup has taken a multi-prong approach based on decentralisation to make audio/video communication more efficient, reliable, and secure, and this includes a video meeting platform, a/v infrastructure, and a decentralsied real-time communication (dRTC) network.

Huddle01 claimed its video platform has already clocked over one million minutes of meetings, and its infrastructure (developer SDKs) has over 100 projects built on top of it.

“Huddle01 is at the forefront of the video and audio communication industry, leveraging blockchain technology to make communication faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever. It has the potential to revolutionise the way people communicate," said Lee Smallwood, Managing Partner at Hivemind.

How Huddle01 works?

Huddle01 was born out of a ETHGlobal hackathon in 2020 with a long-term goal to enable global mass communication facilitated by a permissionless and decentralised media network.

Huddle01’s mission is to enable seamless communication while securing users’ online presence, protecting their digital identities, and allowing them to express themselves freely.

A decentralised network of users allows Huddle01 to build a peer-to-peer (P2P) or node-to-node structure where nodes that are much closer to a specific user are leveraged to host a meeting.

With this, packets of audio-video data don't need to be routed for long distances across various geographies--as is the case with the likes of centralised video calling platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

As such, the P2P network allows Huddle01 to achieve lower latency and higher speeds, thereby enabling a more seamless user experience.

With the fresh funds, the startup plans to support more apps on its platform and launch its network of nodes to facilitate decentralised communication at scale, and reward participants with Huddle01 tokens.

It also plans to roll out grant programmes for developers building on its infrastructure. Further, its dRTC network will be launched by Q4 of 2023.

"We need a self-sovereign decentralised real-time communication network with an incentive mechanism. To achieve that, we need to move away from a client-server architecture to crypto-economic-based node-to-node architecture” said Susmit Lavania, Co-founder and CTO, Huddle01.

(Huddle01 was featured in YourStory's and BuidlersTribe's list of the Top 25 Web3 Innovations in March 2023. Check out the full list and report here)