Web3.0 platform Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) on Thursday said it has secured Series A funding of $10.1 million led by Jump Crypto at a valuation of $131 million.
The round also saw 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.
Besides, the company also secured investments from Web3.0 leaders including 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.
EPNS also said that the Series A round comes with either a nine or 12 months cliff for each investor along with 24 to 30 months vesting.
The firm claims to be the world’s first open communication layer for the Web3.0 ecosystem.
The protocol enables any smart contracts, dApps (decentralized applications), or traditional servers to send notifications tied to wallet addresses of a user in a platform-agnostic fashion, which means, notifications can be integrated and shown on any crypto wallet, mobile apps, extension, or dApps.
With the latest round, EPNS has so far raised $11.42 million, including $1.41 million seed capital.
The platform will use the fresh proceeds to expand its team and develop product beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. EPNS will also push for faster adoption of the protocol, becoming multi-chain.
“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,” Harsh Rajat, Founder, EPNS, told VCCircle.
EPNS said it is betting on the evolving blockchain ecosystem as native Web3.0 communication is becoming necessary for user experience, developer operations, investor security, protocol architecture, and a lot more.
The firm further 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 suboptimal communication.
This gives rise to issues like smart contract version releases getting missed, liquidation thresholds not getting warned, NFT (non-fungible tokens) drops getting forgotten, and vulnerabilities not getting communicated well, it added.
EPNS said it is thus betting on a communication platform to provide an optimized, Web3.0-native solution.
Currently, the firm said it is powering on-chain notifications for ENS (Ethereum name service), CoinDesk (media alerts), Snapshot (governance updates), Oasis (vault liquidation), among others.
EPNS said it is also working with over 80 projects including the likes of Uniswap, Decentraland, MakerDAO, Gitcoin, Polygon, ENS, Dydx, Bancor, Defiant, Coindesk, Aragon, Notional Finance, mStable, Snapshot among others.
EPNS, launched in April 2020 by Richa Joshi and Harsh Rajat, began as a platform sending and receiving push notifications on Ethereum.
