Natix Community, a decentralized bodily infrastructure community (DePIN) targeted on mapping knowledge, has raised $4.6 million in a strategic funding spherical.
Borderless Capital led the spherical, with Tioga Capital co-leading and several other different buyers collaborating, together with Nomura’s Laser Digital, Large Mind Holdings, Escape Velocity, IoTeX, WAGMI Ventures and Moonrock Capital, Natix mentioned Thursday.
Angel buyers, together with Figment Capital managing accomplice James Parillo, Bitget managing director Gracy Chen, bitsCrunch CEO Vijay Pravin Maharajan, and Paul Taylor, additionally joined the spherical.
Natix began elevating funds for the strategic spherical in January of this yr and closed it this week, co-founder and CEO Alireza Ghods informed The Block. He declined to touch upon the construction of the spherical and valuation.
The spherical brings Natix’s whole funding to this point to $9.6 million. It raised $3.5 million final yr and about $1.5 million earlier than that.
Natix right this moment additionally introduced that it’s going to launch its native namesake token on the Solana blockchain within the second quarter of this yr. It’s then additionally anticipated to airdrop 1 billion NATIX tokens to customers in batches, or 1% of the token’s whole provide of 100 billion, Ghods mentioned.
What’s Natix?
Natix is a DePIN venture targeted on gathering real-time geospatial or mapping knowledge. It does so via its cellular app known as Drive&. The app lets customers document mapping knowledge utilizing smartphone cameras and driver assistant apps akin to dashcams and navigation. The information collected is beneficial for mobility corporations and the autonomous driving business, amongst others, serving to them enhance operations and infrastructure, Natix mentioned.
Natix claims to have over 92,000 registered drivers who’ve mapped greater than 28 million kilometers for the reason that app’s launch in April final yr.
“Over 90% of our customers are in our ‘activated/focus areas,’ that are the U.S., Canada, the U.Ok., Central Europe and East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and many others.),” Ghods mentioned.
Natix token launch and airdrop on Solana
In alternate for offering knowledge, Ghods mentioned Natix customers obtain “in-app NATIX” (an in-app non-cryptocurrency) on the finish of every month primarily based on their contribution. After the token launch, customers can convert the in-app NATIX non-cryptocurrency to the Solana SOL
-3.12%
-based NATIX token, Ghods added.
Whereas the token launch is anticipated within the second quarter, the primary batch of the airdrop of 1 billion tokens will happen when Natix achieves its first goal of mapping 100 kilometers, Ghods mentioned, including that he expects to succeed in that concentrate on by July.
“An airdrop occurs when a milestone is achieved, after which we set the following milestone,” Ghods mentioned. “We count on the primary milestone to be round July by the present tempo the community is mapping.”
Whereas Natix’s token will launch on Solana, its platform has a multi-chain method. “We’re additionally utilizing Peaq’s DePIN elements (e.g., multi-chain machine ID and knowledge verification) for the backend infrastructure of our platform,” Ghods mentioned.
Natix’s closest competitor in web3 is Hivemapper. However Natix would not require customers to purchase devoted {hardware} and permits them to affix the community through their smartphones, Ghods mentioned, including that Natix’s Drive& app additionally consumes as much as 99% much less knowledge than rivals.
Natix at the moment employs 20 folks, and Ghods plans to develop the group with contemporary funding by hiring within the engineering and enterprise growth capabilities within the coming months.
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