Lens Protocol raises $15 million to boost decentralized social media

Quick Take

  • Lens Protocol raised $15 million in a funding round led by IDEO CoLab Ventures.

Lens Protocol raised $15 million in a funding round led by IDEO CoLab Ventures to support its quest of delivering decentralized social media.

Other VCs — including General Catalyst, Variant and Blockchain Capital — also participated in the round, as did a few decentralized autonomous organizations, like Flamingo DAO, DAOJones and Punk DAO.

The round also included a raft of well-known angel investors, such as Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams, OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Sandbox co-founder Sébastien Borget, NFT artist Emily Yang (pplpleasr), Mirror.xyz founder Denis Nazarov and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal,

The method of the funding round, whether it was done through equity or tokens, was undisclosed.

“Our vision at Lens is to accelerate the adoption of the next generation of the internet powered by human connection — the people-powered social layer,” said Stani Kulechov, founder of Lens Protocol, in a statement.

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“We believe user empowerment will lead us back to the open web, with the addition of ubiquitous social experiences, diverse content, novel monetization models and profitable new businesses that share revenue equitably with users and creators,” he added.

Lens Protocol is a social graph that can be used to build decentralized social media. It offers a way to store social media activity through NFTs and on-chain data. Current social media sites built on Lens include Lenster, Orb and Lenstube.

Lens is also working on a blockchain scaling solution called Momoka. This will store social media transaction data off-chain while verifying them on-chain.


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Tim is the Editor-In-Chief of The Block. Prior to joining The Block, Tim was a news editor at Decrypt. He has earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of York and studied news journalism at Press Association Training. Follow him on X @Timccopeland.

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