New Vector, creators of Matrix, a new standard for open, secure, decentralized communication, today announced $8.5 million of new funding to accelerate the growth of its commercial services and ongoing development of the Matrix protocol.
The Matrix protocol supports a global interoperable communications network, enabling users to collaborate securely via end-to-end encrypted messaging applications such as Riot.IM, as an alternative to WhatsApp, Telegram or Slack.
The $8.5 million Series A investment came from enterprise tech specialists Notion Capital, Dawn, and firstminute. The funding will support the acceleration of Matrix development and the growth of commercial services at New Vector.
The Matrix network has expanded rapidly during 2019 to more than 11M users and 40K deployments and is being used by the French Government, US Government, Wikimedia, KDE, RedHat, and others.
Today’s $8.5 million Series A follows $5 million raised in 2018, which New Vector used to deliver over 400% growth in Daily Active Users. New Vector expects to see a similar leap forward with this new injection of capital, targeting businesses and governments globally.
With today’s new funding, the priorities of New Vector will be:
- A whole new wave of UX improvements to Riot
- Making Modular hosting as polished and powerful as possible.
- Creating a whole new set of next-generation Modular integrations.
For the Matrix protocol, New Vector will continue to support the development and specification of the most critical features, such as:
- Turning on end-to-end encryption by default for private conversations
- Much better support for grouping rooms into Communities
- More anti-abuse/anti-spam mechanisms
- Shrinking Synapse (and/or finishing Dendrite)
- Canonical DMs (having one DM per user, and have them feel clearly distinct from ‘rooms’)
- Extensible Profiles
- Decentralized accounts
- Threading
- Furthering development on P2P Matrix, so users can have full control of their communications without having to run or trust a server.
“Ensuring there are Matrix apps out there which provide a credible alternative to Slack and WhatsApp will make it the natural successor to today’s instant messaging applications. New funding will allow New Vector to keep investing in Matrix products and services that will fuel growth of the network.”
– New Vector CEO and Matrix Co-founder Matthew Hodgson
