Web3 startup EPNS raises $10.1 mn led by Jump Crypto,Tiger Global, Polygon Studios and others

Web3 startup Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) has raised $10.1 million in its Series A funding round, with an average valuation of $131 million based on the market cap of their token $Push. 

Jump Crypto led the round, with additional participation from Tiger Global, ParaFi, A.Capital, Sino Global Capital, Polygon Studios, Harmony Foundation, Wintermute, Zee Prime Capital, Woodstock Ventures, DCX Ventures, Alpha Wave Capital, Zebpay, TRGC and iSeedVC.

The round also saw investments from Web3 leaders Andrew Keys of DARMA Capital, David Silverman of Aave Companies, Ajit Tripathi, Mateo a Levy, Kane Warwick, Jordan Momtazi and Justin Moses of Synthetix, Aniket Jindal of Biconomy, Anton Bukov of 1inch, Sahil Dewan of Harmony, Jerome de Tychey of Cometh and Ethereum France, Sam of Journal du Coin.

The Series A round comes with either a 9-12 months cliff for each investor along with 24 months to 30 months vesting. EPNS had earlier raised $11.42 million through its seed and Series A round. 

For the unversed, Web3 is said to be the future of the Internet, where the services are built on blockchain and are decentralised. This startup is building a communication layer for the Web3 startups as today’s methods of communication in this space are dominated by Twitter, Discord, and Telegram. As a result, smart contract version releases are missed, liquidation thresholds are not warned, NFT drops are forgotten, and vulnerabilities aren’t communicated well.

“In 2019, we started researching to understand what is missing in the Web3 ecosystem, when we realised the communication part was missing. For instance, how you send messages on Twitter or WhatsApp. The basic form of communication is notification. This layer for wallet addresses needs to be built so that any decentralised applications (dApps) or smart contracts can send messages which are tied through the wallet,” said Harsh Rajat, co-founder of EPNS in a chat with Moneycontrol.

EPNS launched in April 2020 when co-founders husband and wife Richa Joshi and Harsh Rajat built this communication protocol for Web3 platforms. The protocol allows users to send and receive push notifications on Ethereum. EPNS launched on mainnet as a multi-chain protocol in January this year. If one were to liken it to a Web2 service, it would be similar to Apple Push Notification Service, a platform created by Apple that enables third party developers to send push notifications.

EPNS is available in the Apple Store and Google Play. However, it can be accessed by having a crypto wallet given that it operates on a blockchain.

Rajat adds that although the name can be misunderstood, it is platform agnostic and open so any crypto project can use it. The protocol is currently being deployed on Polygon, and will be deployed on Solana in the coming months. The startup has already built a community of 1,10,000 members which is a crucial necessity for any Web3 project to thrive. 

The EPNS team will leverage the funding to expand the team and develop beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. It will also help EPNS push for faster adoption of the protocol, enhance the protocol and enable developers and wallets alike to integrate the protocol.

Apart from their $Push token, the protocol will charge services that are sending notifications, on a monthly or a yearly basis. “The way we designed it, the revenue goes to the protocol. If you're a push token holder, 70 percent of the revenue goes to you. And 30 percent goes to all the crypto wallets that have adopted the token.”

Since it launched in mid-January, EPNS has over 44,000 subscribers and is working with over 80 projects including the likes of Uniswap, Decentraland, MakerDAO, Gitcoin, Polygon, ENS, Dydx, Bancor, Defiant, Coindesk, Aragon, Notional Finance, mStable, Snapshot and more.