Peaq Raises $6M in Funding Round Led by Fundamental Labs

Peaq, a Web3 network that offers decentralized infrastructure and tools to builders and users of decentralized applications, or dapps, for machines, has raised $6 million in seed funding, the company announced Tuesday.

Fundamental Labs led the funding round. Other investors included HashKey Capital, GSR, Delta-v Capital, Mulana Capital, Cypher Capital, GravityX Capital, Waterdrip Capital, Ceras Ventures, Master Ventures and Moonrock Capital.

The fresh capital will support the expansion of peaq’s network, which aims to power an economy in which machines have overtaken millions of previously people-powered jobs by allowing users to create, govern and generate income from dapps for machine-generated goods and services.

The funds will primarily go toward adding to the network’s development team, with some money also reserved for the launch of new products and features to the peaq ecosystem and for increasing awareness around the project in the run-up to peaq’s bid for the Polkadot parachain.

Peaq co-founder Till Wendler said the network’s buildout is an “absolute necessity” as tech companies prepare for the wider adoption of Web3 and smart technologies such as artificial intelligence.

“Today’s funding milestone allows us to continue to strengthen and diversify peaq’s offering as the network that powers a fully decentralized machine economy,” Wendler said. “The enablement of wealth creation in the economy-of-things (EoT) based on aligned economic incentives, shared ownership, universal accessibility and peer-to-peer offering of goods and services is an absolute necessity as the world moves forward with Web3 adoption and as our reliance on AI increases.”

Dapps are smart contract-powered, blockchain-based applications that provide similar services to traditional consumer applications while granting users greater control over their finances and data.

Dapps are most commonly built on the Ethereum blockchain, where they cannot be controlled by a single authority. Without centralized intermediaries to manage their data, users have more control over their finances and data.

Peaq enables users to build and monetize dapps designed for compatibility with vehicles, robots and devices. On peaq, users can build dapps for bike and car shares, electric-vehicle charging stations and peer-to-peer energy trading services.

In April, peaq announced it would run for the Polkadot parachain, allowing the network to achieve seamless cross-chain interoperability with the rest of the Polkadot ecosystem and enhancing the network’s security.

Polkadot, a self-labeled layer 0 blockchain protocol, enables layer 1 parachains like Substrate, on which peaq is built, to securely communicate with each other. As a result, users can easily transfer assets across Polkadot networks without relying on issue-ridden cross-chain bridges.

Peaq plans to bring “a whole new category of liquidity” to the Polkadot ecosystem by introducing machine decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens, according to the Web3 network’s blog.

It also plans to bring more sovereign economic actors to the Polkadot ecosystem by giving millions of machines their own "self-sovereign machine identities" or ​​digital identities that allow machines, vehicles, devices and robots to share their identities with each other, with people and with their environment without relying on centralized third parties.

Read More: What Is Web 3? Here’s How Future Polkadot Founder Gavin Wood Explained It in 2014