Nillion, a web3 startup that aims to build a blockchain-free decentralized network, has closed an oversubscribed round of more than $20 million, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

“Nillion is a deep tech infrastructure project,” Andrew Yeoh, the company’s founding chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch. “While blockchains decentralize finance, Nillion aims to decentralize everything else and the rest of the data.”

The startup aims to provide a new internet infrastructure to secure data storage and computation. “Businesses and competitors can collaborate without passing on key information,” Yeoh said.

Its decentralized network uses Nil Message Compute (NMC), a mathematical development created by the team’s chief scientist, Miguel de Vega. (In its white paper, the company calls NMC a “new cryptographic primitive,” which loosely translates to “new way to store and secure things.”)

While Nillion’s model is not blockchain-based, it does have a decentralized component to it, which means that, according to TechCrunch’s calculations, it falls under the largest web3 banner. It can be thought of as a way to provide decentralized computing power, more generally; the group’s early writings indicate that it will have a token in the future.

“Nillion allows for very fast computations of secure data and the storage of that data that cannot be done with the blockchain,” Yeoh said. “We see it as opening up a whole new universe of web3 use cases that expands the ecosystem significantly.”

The startup was founded in November 2021 and has started operations up to now, with more than 40 employees and no prior funding. The founders include former employees of Uber, Indiegogo, and Hedera Hashgraph, as well as executives from Coinbase and Nike.

The round was led by Distributed Global. Other investors include AU21, Big Brain Holdings, Chapter One, GSR, HashKey, OP Crypto, and SALT Fund. More than 150 investors participated in the raise, in a “conscious decision” to avoid concentrated ownership, Nillion CEO Alex Page said in a statement.

“We were in a position where we could have funded this internally for decades, but we wanted to bring in strong strategic investors and a group of people who could help grow this a lot,” Yeoh said. “We were able to raise quite a significant amount of money in the middle of a bear market. Most of our checks and commitments came after FTX, which is interesting, and we did it without a deck, which is also interesting.”

In the wake of the cryptocurrency bear market and the collapse of FTX, Yeoh believes this capital raise points to industry interest in web3 infrastructure and actual use cases. “We are building an infrastructure that is inevitable. There is no way for web3 or anything to make it into the mainstream if they can’t handle private data.”

The capital will go toward building network technology and hiring engineering talent, Yeoh said. To date, Nillion has signed more than 30 letters of intent, he added.

“We have talked to decentralized exchanges and applications, as well as a couple of layer 1 [blockchains] who are interested in handling private data on blockchains,” Yeoh said. “On the Web2 side, we’ve talked to AI machine learning companies, we’ve been invited to speak at Amazon, and interestingly enough, we’ve had a number of contacts from healthcare and legal firms because they handle a lot of sensitive data.”

In the near term, Nillion plans to focus on developing and supporting real use cases as it rolls out its network alongside its initial suite of products.

“It’s like having an iPhone in 2007, which was awesome but really only had the camera app, the mail app and the messaging app,” Yeoh said at the time.

In two weeks, the startup will have an end-to-end prototype. In 2023, it will become a public network and launch late next year, Yeoh shared. The long-term plan is to “not lose sight” of its mission to solve social problems and build use cases.