Exclusive: 2 VanEck funds back Solana-based DePIN DAWN

VanEck is putting $2.5 million into DAWN, a DePIN project aiming 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 that “multiple funds at VanEck have made a direct investment into the same company,” the firm exclusively told Blockworks. The newest raise comes after Andrena, the company behind DAWN, raised $18 million in a round back in August.*

Andrena CEO Neil Chatterjee told Blockworks that DAWN was designed to capitalize on the “transformation of our lives” as society goes from being wired into the internet to being completely wireless following the rollouts of 5G and Starlink.

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“So now that we are kind of as a society going from a transition from a wired society to a more wireless one, we can actually use that wireless transformation in a way that we can wield it to benefit the end consumer, to benefit the end household, in a way [so they] are owning their own network. With this new transformation, we want homes to be the ones that are taking the benefit,” he explained. 

DAWN’s hardware can be used to reshare internet “no matter what provider you’re with,” and doesn’t need to be DAWN’s specific internet, the Andrena team explained to Blockworks. 

Chatterjee said his project aims to give “anybody all across the globe that has underutilized bandwidth…the means to sell it without having to worry about the customer acquisition.”

The $2.5 million figure will partially be used to scale retail engagement through the hardware, allowing users to create mini networks for internet sharing and let DAWN expand internationally. Right now, the user base is predominantly in the US. 

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Through that, Chatterjee’s team is looking for “partnerships with data centers, internet service providers, real estate, companies, that can kind of give you a very big footprint very quickly, and then we’ll be using our capital to help expedite that deployment process.”

The two biggest goals for the team are trickled down through their plans: onchain revenue and households. Chatterjee declined to give specifics on either metric, but noted that the team is moving to get both in the “millions.”

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

The investment aligns with the new venture fund’s philosophy, which is jumping into an early-stage project with a check from $500,000 to $1 million, as Lonergan explained to the Empire newsletter 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 pouring fuel on the fire. It creates the really amazing network effects that you wouldn’t otherwise get and turns these users into owners. And that kind of strengthens the entire network, in our opinion. So I love the idea of using these mesh networks to bootstrap businesses that otherwise would be really hard to do. That is kind of the promise of tokens.”

But what really drew him, and the Digital Assets Alpha Fund, was the team behind DAWN. 

“WiFi is something, to me, that’s really easy to understand,” which pushes this project more mainstream than other crypto projects, he explained. For VanEck, Lonergan said the goal is to back a “category-winning team,” which both funds believe DAWN is. 

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

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