Development platform Web3 Fleek has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Polychain Capital, the company shared exclusively with TechCrunch.

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

The startup aims to build an interface and a protocol layer “to make the base layer of the web[3] services” such as storage, hosting and billing accessible to anyone, according to its website.

“Our main initial focus is the content delivery market,” Harrison Hines, co-founder of Fleek, told TechCrunch. “That’s what Fleek serves today and where we see a big missing piece in the web3 infrastructure stack. It is a problem with all web3 protocols”.

The content delivery network (CDN) is dominated by some big players like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare, to name a few, Hines said. And while Fleek originally worked with Web 2.0 infrastructure providers such as AWS and Cloudflare, it plans to launch its own Fleek Network in 2023 and provide web3 technologies such as decentralization, while still achieving Web 2.0-like performance, Hines added.

“Our vision for the Fleek Network at its core is a decentralized perimeter network where anyone can run nodes and provide resources to the network,” Hines said. “The internet is moving towards the edge now. Most of the larger platforms are related to the perimeter.”

Hines defines edge as moving content away from a central server location to bring a loose coupling of different cloud infrastructures and services closer to the end user.

Fleek hosts about 50,000 applications on its platform today, mostly within the Ethereum ecosystem, but also among other protocols, Hines noted. To date, all Fleek products are based on cryptographic protocols such as Ethereum, Filecoin, Internet Computer, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and Textile.

The new capital will be used to build out the Fleek Network and the platform, while attracting additional talent and growing its community, Hines said.

The startup will first focus on developing in the web3 ecosystem, but will then expand into Web 2.0 businesses like gaming platforms, streaming services or any platform with heavy traffic, which is typically one of its biggest costs, Hines said. . “In this market, where large companies are looking to reduce costs, we believe that Fleek Network can be an attractive solution and an easier jump.”

Fleek’s pricing is “fluid, so the metrics can be adjusted as it grows,” Hines said, but compared to Cloudflare, which charges five to 15 cents per gigabyte for bandwidth, Fleek aims to stay around under a penny per gigabyte, making it five to 15 times less expensive.

“We have been trying to do this for years and there has been great progress in [the crypto ecosystem for] scalability and how to actually build these networks that gave us the confidence that we can do it and are on par with the scale, throughput and latency of existing web2 systems,” Hines said. “It was the perfect timing.”