Fleek raises $25M to provide content delivery for Web3 developers

Fleek, a developer platform for Web3, announced Thursday that it raised $25 million in new funding led by Polychain Capital to build a decentralized content delivery and hosting network for Web3 developers.

Additional investors joining in the Series A round included Protocol Labs, Arweave, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO and Argonautic Ventures.

Founded in 2018, Fleek is a developer platform for blockchain-based decentralized applications on Web3 protocols, also known as the decentralized web. The current platform was built to deliver its content mainly from Web2 content networks such as Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, which are services controlled by corporations.

By storing Web3 and crypto project data for dapps, nonfungible tokens on centralized services, Web3 advocates argue that they leave their data vulnerable to the centralized rules of Web2 development, hosting and content delivery. The objective of a fully decentralized content delivery network using Web3 protocols helps disentangle crypto projects from centralized points of failure.

Fleek Network, scheduled for launch in 2023, will provide a decentralized content and application delivery for Web3 while delivering the same high performance expected from content delivery and hosting services such as AWS.

“Fleek is providing a critical missing piece to achieving a legitimate decentralized Web3 experience,” said Harrison Hines, co-founder and chief executive of Fleek. “With Fleek Network, we will be empowering developers and organizations with an easy and seamless mechanism for Web3 hosting and content delivery that will help deliver on the promise of creating a truly decentralized internet.”

Multiple big names in decentralized storage and content delivery joined to back Fleek Network including the InterPlanetary File System, Filecoin and Arweave. Networks such as the IPFS and Filecoin act as peer-to-peer networks for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system, similar to AWS but decentralized.

“The team at Fleek has a unique skill set to bring forward protocol-agnostic, decentralized hosting and a content delivery layer for Web3,” said Olaf Carlson-Wee, Polychain Capital founder and chief executive.