VanEck is investing $2.5 million in DAWN, a DePIN project that aims to create a decentralized Internet service provider. The investment comes from VanEck's Digital Assets Alpha fund and VanEck Ventures.

The strategic funding round marks the first time multiple funds have been “sourced.” Van Eyck “They made a direct investment in the same company,” the company exclusively told Blockworks. The latest increase comes after Andrina, the company behind DAWN, It raised $18 million On tour in August.*

Neil Chatterjee, CEO of Andrena, told Blockworks that DAWN is designed to capitalize on “the shift in our lives” as society shifts from being online to being fully wireless following the rollout of 5G and Starlink.

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“And now that we're kind of as a society transitioning from going from a wired society to a more wireless society, we can actually use that wireless shift in a way that we can use it to the benefit of the end consumer, to the benefit of the home end, in a way (so they) own their own network,” he explained. The new transformation, we want homes to be the ones that benefit.

The Andrena team explained to Blockworks that DAWN devices can be used to reshare the internet “no matter what provider you are with,” and the internet does not need to be DAWN-specific.

Chatterjee said his project aims to give "anyone around the world who hasn't used bandwidth enough... a way to sell without having to worry about customer acquisition."

The $2.5 million will be used in part to expand retail sharing through devices, allowing users to create small internet sharing networks and allowing DAWN to expand globally. Currently, the user base is mostly located in the United States.

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Through this, Chatterjee's team is looking for "partnerships with data centers, ISPs, real estate, enterprises, that can give you a very large footprint very quickly, and then we will use our capital to help accelerate that deployment process."

The team's two biggest goals are achieved through their plans: onchain revenue and captivity. Chatterjee declined to provide details on either measure, but noted that the team is moving to get "millions" for both.

For VanEck Ventures, which launched in October, DAWN offers a product that is not only “economically competitive” but also challenges the “monopolistic nature” of legacy ISPs, general partner Wyatt Lonergan told Blockworks.

The investment is in line with the philosophy of the new investment fund, which jumps into an early-stage venture with a check ranging from $500,000 to $1 million, Lonergan says. He explained to the Empire Bulletin in October.

According to Lonergan, DAWN aims to disrupt the monopoly held by traditional ISPs while giving "the consumer a better product, (and putting them) in control, (so) the token is kind of adding fuel to the fire. It creates really amazing network effects that you wouldn't otherwise get." On it in another way and it turns those users into owners and that kind of strengthens the whole network, in our opinion so I like the idea of ​​using these overlapping networks to start businesses that would otherwise be difficult to do "With symbols."

But what really attracted him, and the digital asset Alpha Fund, was the team behind DAWN.

“WiFi is something that is really easy to understand for me,” he explained, pushing this project further into the mainstream than other cryptocurrency projects. For VanEck, Lonergan said the goal is to support a “category-winning team,” which is what both funds believe DAWN is.

Disclosure: Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks and host of Empire, also participated in August's DAWN Tour.

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