Web3 Content-Delivery Network Fleek Raises $25M

Web3 developer platform Fleek has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round that was led by crypto-focused venture-capital firm Polychain Capital.

The funding will accelerate the development and launch of a decentralized content and application delivery network called Fleek Network, which will be released in the spring or summer of 2023.

“Currently, there is a missing piece in the Web3 infrastructure stack: trustless content delivery and acceleration. This is the gap Fleek Network fills,” Fleek co-founder and CEO Harrison Hines told CoinDesk in an email.

Hines noted that while there are several decentralized storage and data protocols such as Filecoin and Arweave, those protocols share a common problem in that querying the files, data and content from the networks they are stored on loads slowly.

From the consumer side, developers or projects needing a content-delivery network can provide content to the Fleek Network. Fleek accelerates that content using a decentralized network of nodes. Consumers prepay for the bandwidth in the native FLK tokens, said Hines.

Other investors in the round included Protocol Labs, Arweave, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, North Island Ventures, Distributed Global, The LAO and Argonautic Ventures.

Digital Currency Group is the parent company of CoinDesk.

Read more: Crypto Exchange Uniswap Labs Raises $165M in Polychain Capital-Led Round

CORRECTION (Dec. 1, 15:00 UTC): Corrects fourth paragraph to say querying does not work well. An earlier version of this story said the protocols were unable to make those queries.