High-speed Wi-Fi internet provider Andrea announced today the company raised $18 million in an extended Series A round led by Dragonfly Capital to develop a decentralized broadband protocol.
The round also attracted investments from CMT Digital, Castle Island Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, 6th Man Ventures and ParaFi. It brings the company’s total raised to $38 million, including a $15 million Series A round announced last year, which Dragonfly also led.
The company is developing a protocol known as DAWN, or decentralized autonomous wireless network, that will allow users to sell excess internet bandwidth to a network of providers. It is based on decentralized physical infrastructure networking, or DePIN, which uses a network of wireless base stations attached to rooftops to provide mesh internet access without a centralized provider.
DePIN uses both physical infrastructure and blockchain technology for token incentives so that users don’t need to purchase their own equipment.
According to Andrena, traditional internet service providers are costly because running copper wires and fiber optics is an expensive investment to build and maintain. Whereas wireless technology reduces these costs, DAWN takes this a step further by allowing everyone involved in the network to contribute.
“DAWN aims to do to the internet what solar panels did to electricity,” said Neil Chatterjee, co-founder of DAWN and Andrena. “The same way consumers own and generate their own utility and sell their excess back to the grid, there is now an opportunity to do the same with wireless home and business internet.”
The company currently delivers internet services across 10 U.S. states, including New York, New Jersey, Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Pennsylvania with hundreds of homes in the network. The company said it intends to gradually move its existing customer base onto the new DAWN protocol to begin using blockchain token incentives.
Customers will be able to use a mobile app to purchase DAWN tokens using a mobile app and then exchange them to buy internet bandwidth from the network. The network has also launched a Chrome browser extension that allows anyone globally to join the network as a validator, which allows users to support the network by helping secure it by providing computation power. Customers can earn tokens as rewards for staying connected to the DAWN network, referring friends and participating as a validator.
Andrena said that the new funding would support the completion of the DAWN protocol and continue to expand the company’s subscriber base. The project itself is currently in a testnet phase on the Solana blockchain and has no announced timeline for launch.
According to the company, at launch DAWN’s wireless network will cover more than 3 million households and there are plans to grow that number. Although the initial rollout will be focused on the United States, the company intends to expand globally in the future.