Yes. Just a bit of cursory searching shows they raised $8m in seed funding in 2023 and another $15m in 2024 from various backers.
According to TechCrunch, here's where the money came from:
Seed Round of $8m
Series A Round of $15m
Discussion
Ohhhhh... so backers are putting more in. Very intriguing that the 2024 seed round involved crypto backers, even though Bluesky says they won't take that route. 🤔 So the question is, what are those backers getting in return? 🧐
Well, I mean, most of us are just volunteers and the few that get paid, are kept on such a low budget that they struggle to retain staff.
We have like 10 people working on our nostr:nprofile1qqsggm4l0xs23qfjwnkfwf6fqcs66s3lz637gaxhl4nwd2vtle8rnfqprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qfqwaehxw309ahx7um5wghx26tww4hxg7nhv9h856t89eehqctrv5hsz8rhwden5te0w35x2cmfw3skgetv9ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hsjmvd7t project and none of us earn any money for it, except zaps and subscriptions. So, we can't fully concentrate on the project and coordination is haphazard because we're all off at our day jobs and side-gigs.
Well, except Primal, but even they aren't high-rolling like Signal or BlueSky or whatever. I think Signal was just doing a $50 million dollar funding round, for what is just a DM app.
This seems important. 🤔
On the positive side, Nostr projects have brutally-low operating costs, which is incredibly sustainable. That's why it's been going for nearly 5 years on nothing but shitposts, cat pics, dev fights, and Bitcoin dust. And it has been getting steadily better.
The other projects need tens of millions of users and millions of dollars of donations, to even justify their existence and cover costs. If our stuff ever takes off, the financial upside is ginormous.
It will take off organically like bitcoin. It enriches everyone, as opposed to only enriching some corporation controlling it. That is revolutionary and it takes time to grow but as it does it becomes completely unstoppable and will eventually overtake the old paradigm.
Yeah, I've seen this effect a few times in my life, so I'm probably calmer about this, than some of the younger devs.
I suspect there will also soon be more large teams forming, and that will boost everything quickly.
I'm also not complaining. We're actually surprisingly productive, for such a messy, asynchronous project structure. Just have to get the DevOps straight, push comms, and let people manage themselves.