Nova Labs (aka Helium Inc.), a San Francisco, CA-based leader in decentralized wireless communications, raised $200M in Series D equity funding.
The round was led by Tiger Global and Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Seven Seven Six, Goodyear Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Liberty Global, NGP Capital (backed by Nokia), Pantera Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Deutsche Telekom’s strategic investment fund Telekom Innovation Pool (TIP).
The company intends to use the funds to invest in its ecosystem through hiring and additional development to improve the network, driving continued wireless protocol support, building new applications on top of the Helium Network powered by cryptocurrency, growing the team, and working towards a decentralized future of wireless connectivity.
Co-founded by Shawn Fanning and Amir Haleem in 2013, Nova Labs is a pioneer of decentralized wireless communications, which has enabled global IoT and 5G networks that have created a new category of connectivity and given hundreds of thousands of people the opportunity to build the Network from home and earn rewards.
The company’s blockchain-based model empowers people around the world to become a mini cell tower by deploying Hotspots and rewarding them in the Helium Network’s native token, $HNT, for providing coverage. This incentive model, originally created by Nova Labs, has enabled the Helium ecosystem to build wireless infrastructure faster than big telecommunication companies at a fraction of the cost. The Helium Network launched in 2019 and earlier this year surpassed half a million Hotspots, and today provides coverage for over 52,000 cities across 169 countries.
IoT and network industry leaders including Goodyear, Actility, Senet, Kore, X-TELIA and DISH partnered with the Network to use its coverage for enterprise customers including, Volvo Group, Cisco, Schneider Electric, Accenture, Olympus, One Planet, Careband, Hoopo, Invoxia, Victor, and others.
FinSMEs
30/03/2022