Blockchain Startup Huddle01 Bags Funding To Build Decentralised Real-Time Communication Network

India and US-based video conferencing platform Huddle01, which is building a decentralised real-time communication (dRTC) network has raised $2.8 Mn in a seed funding round from blockchain investment firm Hivemind.

Other investors such as Temasek’s Web3 arm Superscrypt, M31 Capital, Protocol Labs, East Ventures, Longhash Ventures, Good News Ventures, and some angel investors also participated in the round.

Huddle01 plans to deploy the incoming fund to grow its ecosystem to support dApps and launch its network of nodes to facilitate communication. Further, Huddle01 will roll out grant programs to empower developers to build apps on Huddle01’s infrastructure.

Huddle01 has raised $4.5 Mn in funding so far across multiple rounds from 19 investors.

Founded in 2020 by Ayush Ranjan and Susmit Lavania, Huddle01 claims to leverage blockchain technology to enable real-time communication. According to the startup, it has clocked in more than 1 Mn minutes of meetings.

Huddle01 shared that its infrastructure (developer SDKs) has more than 100 projects built on top of it, while the dRTC network will eliminate the need for centralised servers for real-time communication.

Elaborating on the startup’s goals, Ayush Ranjan, cofounder, and CEO, Huddle01 said, “Decentralisation should be a slider and not a switch. With its demand-first approach, Huddle01 plans to create enough demand on its infrastructure to ensure that when it launches the network with incentives, it becomes self-sustaining and self-propelling with better performance, privacy and costs as compared to centralised incumbents.”

Lavania, who is also the CTO of Huddle01, added, “We need a self-sovereign decentralised real-time communication network with an incentive mechanism. To achieve that, we need to move away from client-server architecture to crypto-economic-based node-to-node architecture.”

Huddle01’s funding comes at a time when Indian startup funding is on the decline. According to Inc42’s ‘Indian Tech Startup Funding Report, Q1 2023’, seed stage funding plummeted by 81% year-on-year in the quarter ended March 31, 2023, compared to the year-ago quarter.

Recent funding activity in the blockchain and the wider Web3 space includes Polytrade’s $3.8 Mn round in March 2023 and Glip’s $2.5 Mn round in November 2022. Further, the blockchain, AI and game development company Yudiz Solutions filed its papers for an initial public offer (IPO) on the NSE Emerge in March 2023.

While the government’s stance on cryptocurrencies is rigid, many union and state ministers have spoken in the favour of using Web3 and blockchain in many e-governance initiatives.

Last year, the Union Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman said that Web3 will bring sweeping changes to the way financial information is handled. Speaking with Inc42 last year, the Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar also said that the government does not have any laws that prevent startups from innovating in crypto or Web3.