Our Investment in Notifi Network
We are excited to announce that Race Capital has co-led an investment into Notifi Network, a Web3 notification infrastructure platform, in its $2.5M pre-seed round partnering with Paul Kim, Nimesh Amin, and the Notifi team.
Notifi is building the Twilio for Web3, starting with decentralized application (dApp) developers on the Solana and Terra ecosystems. Notifi offers a simple embeddable notification layer for developers to plug into their existing DeFi, NFT, gaming, or DAO applications to communicate with their users,notifying them on important events such as DAO proposal changes or liquidation events via email, text, or telegram — with many more channels to come.
The main reasons we decided to support Notifi is realizing how broken the Web3 infrastructure is, their infrastructure chop, and future market potential.
Web3 Communication is Broken
The Web3 communication layer is broken. With Web3 or DeFi apps — there are no methods to directly communicate with specific users even in situations where it’s critical to do so.
In the Web2 space, users sign up with their email/password to create accounts and act as the default channel to communicate with users. However, this is not the case in Web3. Since authentication and sign in happens with wallet addresses, there are no natural methods for developers to communicate with their users Web3. Much of this “user notifications” happen on Discord or Telegram where it’s extremely unspecific and un-targeted.
Here are just a few use cases for Notifi are addressing:
- Notifications on new governance votes
- Notifications on results of governance actions
- Notifications about bids on marketplaces
- Notifications on liquidations
- Notifications of incoming/outgoing transactions
These will all be architected in a way where the Web3 developers have customizability and can embed specific notification modals directly into their app interfaces, similar to how Twilio went to market for its services when it first started.
Badass Web3 Native Team with Strong Infrastructure Muscle
We at Race Capital always look for strong technical founders with the ability to ship quickly, and the Notifi team is no better example of this.
Paul Kim, CEO of Notifi, was previously the Director of Product at Circle where he most recently launched Circle Yield, and before that was the Director of Product at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure where he was responsible for launching Oracle’s Notification Services among other products around monitoring and alerts. Paul also held senior product roles at Amazon Web Services and Grab.
Nimesh Amin, CTO of Notifi, met Paul when he was working on search and cloud infrastructure at Oracle Cloud, where he was responsible for streaming, messaging, Email, and Inter-Service Connectors architecture.
Notification infrastructure is one of those technical areas where you need strong experience building infrastructure and scaling systems in production — for developers to trust and adopt it into their own applications.
Our Vision for Web3 Communications
User notifications and communication will be one of the important build blocks for Web3.
If done right, unlike Web2 notifications, the users themselves will be able to truly customize and manage their own notification preferences and orchestrate all of their individual settings from a wallet they control.
If done right, no more surprises on liquidations, governance votes or results. No more hiding in the dark with what is going on with your bids and transactions.
For Notifi we believe the market potential is all developers within the web3 ecosystem, currently 18,000 active developers & growing 100% compared to the prior year.
We look forward to building a strong partnership with Paul & Nimesh and helping the team to redefine the future of web3 communication infrastructure.
