NEAR’s core product is NEAR Protocol, a public, sharded proof-of-stake blockchain that uses a consensus mechanism called Nightshade to achieve high throughput and predictable costs for decentralized applications. By offering features such as meta-transactions, contract-based accounts and gas-fee rebates at the protocol level, NEAR aims to make dApps almost as easy to build and use as traditional web apps. The company is led by competitive programming champions and veterans from Google, Facebook, Niantic and MemSQL; co-founder and CEO Alex Skidanov was MemSQL’s first employee, while CTO Illia Polosukhin contributed to Google’s TensorFlow. NEAR has launched a beta program to onboard a cohort of projects expected to deploy on the platform later this year. Fresh capital will be directed toward hiring additional engineers, expanding developer tooling and bringing the mainnet to market. Although no revenue or user figures were disclosed, the team emphasizes scalability and mainstream adoption as key objectives. Once launched, the protocol is intended to remove theoretical limits on network capacity by parallelizing computation across shards.

Total raised

$384M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Apr 2022