Here Not There Labs, a remote firm developing cutting-edge internet communication models, secured $25.5 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz via a16zcrypto, with participation from Benchmark and Framework Ventures. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.
Here Not There Labs is developing Towns, a group chat protocol and app for online communities to create better online hometowns.
The new project aims to change connectivity provided by Web2 companies like Twitter and Facebook, now Meta, which built global empires around this idea. But their connectivity came at a hefty price as users were commoditized to sell ads.
Towns will change it using a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol. Towns enable the residents of a community to control their town squares.
While the business will initially oversee the product, as they move towards network decentralization, governance and management of Towns will gradually be transferred to the Towns DAO.
“The team’s vision for creating a digital town square where members can define the borders, set the rules, and build the world they want is an ambitious goal uniquely achievable through the promise of decentralization and web3,” said Sriram Krishnan, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Towns is a group chat protocol and app designed for online communities
In 2020, Rubin—the former CEO and co-founder of Houseparty and Meerkat—and Brian Meek, the former CTO of STRIVR Labs and the former general manager of engineering at Skype, co-founded Here Not There Labs.
According to their description, Towns is a group chat protocol and program for online communities to improve “hometowns” and engage in open communication while utilizing end-to-end encryption.
The Towns app, which Rubin compares to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), attempts to take the town square concept and implement it on the Ethereum blockchain using smart contracts, enabling communities to trade NFTs and play games.
In a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), control is distributed rather than hierarchical. Participants in DAOs vote on proposed actions using governance tokens and smart contracts on a blockchain.
A DAO can potentially exist on any chat platform; however, the majority do so on Discord and are governed by its rules of service.
Towns join a growing group of initiatives, such as Dragonchain’s Den, Matrix, Console, and Nansen Connect from the analytics platform Nansen, that aim to migrate Web3 projects away from Telegram and Discord.
