Participated · Seed · Jul 2023

Snowstorm began as the open-source Snowflake pluggable transport for Tor and has been rebuilt to run standalone and outside Tor, with a Rust rewrite to improve speed and cross-platform support. The software connects users to volunteer brokers via WebRTC and domain fronting, enabling millions of sessions daily and relying on roughly 100,000 people acting as temporary brokers. Snowstorm’s upgrades aim to remove previous bottlenecks, support system-wide use, and enable streaming video performance. The company plans to launch an open beta this quarter and will use new funding to continue product development rather than heavy marketing. Founder Serene—who taught herself to code, was hired by Google as a teenager, and was the first engineer at Google Ideas (now Google Jigsaw)—leads development and remains focused on building the core technology.