Switzerland-based privacy startup Neem Technologies has raised millions of dollars, which is slowly being marked as around in the series. Earlier raised ones included a $2.5 million seed round in 2019. The organization also received grants from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research fund at a pre-research and development stage to develop network technology.
The latest funding will be used to continue the commercial development of the network infrastructure, which combines an old idea to drive a crypto-inspired reputation and the required quality of service to integrate data packet metadata at the transport network level (mix nets) and to support a stable, decentralized infrastructure. The pitch of Neem is that it is “an open-end anonymous overlay network that works to disguise Internet traffic in an unmistakable pattern”.
Surprisingly, in order to focus on crypto mechanics, Series A investors have strong cryptocurrencies – and in the case of cryptocurrency-related uses, Nim expects to come from its first users – with a large number of participants in the round led by Polychain Capital with Eden Block more small European investors, including Greenfield One, Maven 11, Tioga and 1KX. Commenting in a statement, Will Wolf of Polchain Capital said: “We are incredibly excited to partner with NIM to bring a strong, sustainable and unauthorized privacy infrastructure to all Internet users. We believe that the NIM network will guarantee the strongest privacy with the highest quality service on any Mixnet and thus become an extremely valuable part of the core Internet infrastructure.”
The “real sin” of the Internet is that the original infrastructure was not built with privacy in mind. So the level of complexity involved with MyKnets – replacing and delaying encrypted data packets to protect sender-to-recipient metadata with a global perspective on a network – probably felt like web engineering when the web sculpture was being piled together. But then came the bitcoin and crypto boom, and – in 2013, Snowden’s publication also broke the NSA’s “collect it all” mantra, as Buzz Allen Hamilton’s subcontractor Ed risked throwing data at himself (and other) government people.
