Fedi, a financial and data technology company founded by Nigerian Bitcoin advocate Obi Nwosu, has recently secured $17 million in a Series A funding round. The company is now preparing to launch an alpha version of Fedi for builders later in May 2023.
“We are excited that with so much interest in this round, we were able to select investors who are fully aligned on the future we are trying to create with Fedi, the world’s first federated operating system,” said CEO Obi Nwosu in a blog post.
Fedi, which is interoperable with the Bitcoin Lightning Network thanks to the Fedimint Protocol, is a technology company that builds global bitcoin adoption technology. The Fedi mobile app is the company’s main product, designed to help billions of people use bitcoin securely, privately, and scalably. The company, which Nwosu co-founded with Eric Sirion and Justin Moon, aims to be the world’s first federated operating system empowering individuals to collaborate through ‘federations made up of friends, families, neighbors, non-profit organisations, social clubs, businesses, conferences, and other forms of community to take control of their money, their data, and their digital lives while still protecting user privacy and autonomy.’
Using the app, a user can create a federation, invite members, who can then chat and transact Bitcoin privately all in one place. Community leaders can customize the experience with sites & services relevant to community members. Fedi says it is different from other Bitcoin wallets in two key ways: Federated Custody and Privacy. Instead of entrusting your funds to an unknown third party, users can store their funds with community leaders they know and trust. Through the use of eCash technology, Fedi provides an added layer of privacy.
read also Launch Africa to Invest New $75M in Tech Startups Across Africa
Fedi is built on the Fedimint protocol, an open-source protocol for custodying and transacting bitcoin in a community context, which makes it easy for developers to build additional apps and modules to complement Fedi’s offerings and give more options to users. “The Bitcoin community already knows the tremendous potential of the protocol,” said Nwosu. “But what’s most exciting about Fedi is that you don’t have to be an existing Bitcoiner, or even particularly tech-savvy, to quickly start using this to solve real problems within your community,” added Nwosu, who is one of 4 Africans serving as a board member of the Btrust Bitcoin Development Fund by Jay Z and Jack Dorsey.
The financing round, which brings the total amount raised by Fedi to $21.21 million, was led by Ego Death Capital, with participation from TBD, part of Block, Kingsway, Trammell Venture Partners, and TimeChain. Earlier seed round investors included Ten 31, Hivemind, Steve Lee, and Recursive Capital.
read also Bybit Introduces a New Era of Hassle-Free Crypto Lending
“Bitcoin offered a truly decentralized currency. Lightning offered truly decentralized payments for bitcoin. And Fedi is offering a truly decentralized and federated way not only to custody bitcoin but to take back control of everything that matters in your digital life,” said Jeff Booth, Co-Founder of Ego Death Capital and lead investor for the series.
Fedi crypto Fedi crypto
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard