Decentralized Identity Startup Intuition Raises $4M in Funding Round
The company is building infrastructure for social knowledge aggregation
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, June 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Decentralized infrastructure provider Intuition has raised $4 million in a seed round fundraise led by Superscrypt. The raise comes as Intuition approaches the public launch of its protocol and first applications later this year.
Intuition lets users create attestations about any subject, storing the information in such a way that it's easily navigable, queryable, and leveraged by other applications. Intuition's founder, Ethereum veteran Billy Luedtke, explains that the protocol was created to capture the wisdom of crowds about everything, while making that wisdom available and open to everyone.
"Today, determining truth to make informed decisions is a complex and difficult task," says Jacob Ko, Partner at Superscrypt. According to Ko, "Information is largely concentrated in big tech platforms, search and curation algorithms are opaque, and identity and reputation standards are too fragmented to provide strong signals. Intuition's approach of incentivizing crowdsourced knowledge and opinions from users in a globally inclusive and decentralized way will fuel better understanding of any person, ID or topic. It has the potential to change the way we disseminate, consume and understand information and we're excited to back a team with deep experience working on data interoperability and digital identity."
Other participants in the round include Shima Capital, Avon Ventures, WW Ventures, Matrixport Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and ConsenSys, along with several other VC, DAO, and angel investors. This round follows a fundraise last November co-led by Andrew Keys, founder of DARMA Capital, and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys.
Whereas decentralized identity has largely focused on high sensitivity credentials, like KYC and the identities of people, Intuition facilitates robust decentralized identity that pertains to all things. "Nearly everything can and should have decentralized identifiers (DIDs)," Luedtke explains. "Whether that's a person, pseudonym, web3 product, organization, or even a news article."
According to Luedtke, "We presently rely on a fundamentally flawed system of siloed, centralized platforms such as Yelp, LinkedIn, and Twitter to inform our intuition about the world around us. These platforms shape our perception with fragmented, incomplete, and occasionally misleading information."
As a protocol, Intuition doesn't take a view on whether something is true or false, but instead captures and shows what people are saying about a thing. By allowing people to freely share their opinions about any subject, and verifiably attaching that data to DIDs in an open knowledge graph, Luedtke hopes to improve the reputation and identity data that we societally have access to regarding the things we're interacting with every day.
"Our digital identities form the bedrock of a flourishing data-driven economy and society. However, the vast reservoir of digital knowledge on the internet still exists in a disparate and incomplete state. For a future free from these fractured conditions, we require purpose-built infrastructure that fosters the creation and seamless access to consolidated, trustworthy, and permissionless information. Anchored by an exceptional team, Intuition harnesses web3 primitives to align ownership and incentives, driving forward this transformative vision. I am thrilled to support their journey towards this exciting future," said Alex Lin, Head of Research and Investor at Shima Capital.
Intuition's protocol and middleware allow developers to easily integrate the company's attestations and knowledge graph into their own applications. Intuition will initially launch with a knowledge graph explorer built atop the protocol, and will directly display human-readable data regarding wallet addresses inside popular web wallets.
For more on Intuition visit intuition.systems.
About Intuition
Intuition provides decentralized infrastructure, developer tools, and applications enabling the creation of an open, flexible knowledge graph enhancing the quality and availability of social knowledge. Intuition was founded in 2022 by Ethereum veteran Billy Luedtke and is backed by Superscrypt, Shima Capital, Polygon Ventures, ConsenSys, Andrew Keys, and Joseph Lubin along with several other VC, DAO, and angel investors. https://intuition.systems/
About Superscrypt
Superscrypt is an early stage crypto-native VC whose mission is to onboard the next wave of builders and users into the web3 space. We invest in category-defining web3 teams, and partner with them to scale their business. Our focus is on infrastructure and emerging use cases; including wallets, identity and credentials, developer tools, data indexing and search, scaling and privacy. Superscrypt is made up of founders who have decades of building and scaling technology businesses, and we leverage this experience to help our teams with GTM, product, technology, tokenomics, strategy and community building. https://www.superscrypt.xyz/
About Shima Capital
Shima Capital is a leading early stage VC firm, founded by Yida Gao in 2021, investing in disruptive blockchain companies. The fund is deeply focused on taking a hands-on approach and working closely with its portfolio companies to provide the most sweat equity per dollar invested. As teams in web3 push the frontier of innovation, Shima helps hire talent, build community, amplify narratives, and foster the acceleration of technical research and development. Shima is composed of seasoned investors, accomplished operators, and former founders who align on a mission to support all-star teams with building and scaling generational companies. For more https://shima.capital/
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