Big Whale Labs, a web 3 social startup, secures $655,000 in a Pre-seed Funding round led by Slow Ventures.
The web3 social startup also secured finding from Samsung Next, Intonation Ventures, NFT Investments PLC, and angels including Anton Bukov and Sergej Kunz, co-founders of 1inch Network; Alex Shin co-founder of Hashed, Korea’s largest Crypto VC; and others.
Big Whale Labs plans to use the new funding to accelerate product development as it gears up to launch its first product and tools.
What is Big Whale Labs?
Vancouver-based Big Whale Labs is a Web3 Social Startup? It is using web 3 technologies to reimagine what digital identity, the social graph, and network could be. Their first product allows people to build and interact as pseudonymous NFT identities but with verified credentials and reputations attached to these NFTs. Their tool will be built on the Ethereum blockchain.
Team Behind Big Whale Labs
Big Whale Labs is founded by Jason and Nikita who were college floormates nearly a decade ago, working on iOS apps together when they were teenagers.
Nikita is Telegram’s most successful third-party app developer. He’s scaled his apps to over 60 million aggregate users globally, most recently exiting Shieldy Telegram Bot to 1Inch Defi Networks after scaling to 20 million users.
Co-founder and CEO Jason Kim, said:
“Big Whale Labs’ mission is to enhance human-to-human connection online to make social more safe, fun, secure, and free. Our goal with Big Whale Labs is to both enhance how web 3 communities interact on web 2 platforms like Discord and Telegram and to also introduce new mechanisms that are completely native to web 3 like owning fractional identities, your social graph, and pseudonymous but verified credentials.”
Anton Bukov, Cofounder of 1inch Network, commented:
“I know Nikita as one of the most focused serial entrepreneurs who have a proven track record and an understanding of how to achieve the most challenging goals. Social networks are the area yet to be disrupted by decentralized technologies, while Nikita and Jason are totally equipped to accomplish this endeavor. And I’m happy to be part of the future revolution!”
The Problem: Social is stuck in the last decade
Co-founder of Big Whale Labs says that the social platforms are stuck in the last decade. Asymmetric downside to sharing ideas freely because the content is bundled with IRL identity. Echo chamber communities because the social graph is either too tied to IRL or is hyperbolic. Zero innovation in user-to-user interaction outside of stories, stickers, and audio messages. And, Big Whale Labs intends to solve this problem.
CTO Nikita Kolmogorov, said:
“Currently, my products are being used by over 60 million people globally. I’ve seen firsthand how many DAOs and crypto communities interact and believe there should be much better tooling to support these communities and people.”
The company says that it will continue the development of Dosu, its web 3 social app, StreetCred, its pseudonymous credential protocol, and SocialGraph.
“Our goal is to allow people to build pseudonymous, fractionalized identities, but provide a zero-knowledge proof platform to verify information and credentials about these accounts.”
Big Whale Labs