Project DePIN Daylight Successfully Raises $9 Million in Series A Funding, Backed by A16z Crypto
In a recent Series A funding round, Daylight, a pioneering company in the energy sector, has secured $9 million from A16z Crypto and other notable investors. The funds will be used to develop Daylight's Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) for energy distribution.
Founded in 2022 by Jason Badeaux, Udit Patel, and Evan Caron, Daylight aims to disrupt the energy industry with its decentralized protocol. This protocol allows developers to interact with the energy grid using distributed energy resources, creating a more efficient and sustainable energy ecosystem.
According to a blog post from A16z partners Guy Wuollet and Ali Yahya, Daylight's work is significant in the disruption of the energy industry, particularly in the U.S. They view Daylight as a company that is building a decentralized protocol for the energy grid, which has the potential to challenge the highly regulated energy monopolies in the country.
The development plan for Daylight's DePIN focuses on leveraging blockchain-based incentives, a decentralized architecture, and community governance to transform energy infrastructure. This includes a crypto incentive mechanism to mobilize and optimize capital allocation, a distributed, redundant network design for enhanced stability and reliability, community-centered governance for practical needs and democratic control, and technological advancements using hybrid blockchain applications.
The strategic emphasis is on building a decentralized, interoperable, and community-managed energy infrastructure. This vision includes integrating Daylight’s energy infrastructure with other DePIN protocols, fostering broader collaboration, and maximizing network effects in physical infrastructure.
Daylight's energy marketplace is already operational in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, offering support for upgrades for energy sources like solar panels, electric vehicle chargers, and heat pumps. The platform works by pooling together resources from different providers and making them available to those connected to the protocol.
Users can also connect their energy devices such as thermostats, batteries, and electric vehicles to Daylight's app and earn rewards. Moreover, the proprietary energy data from Daylight's protocol can be used to build novel applications, such as voltage monitoring to reduce electrical fire risk for property insurance.
With the funding secured, Daylight is poised to take a significant step towards creating a fair, efficient, and sustainable energy distribution network built on voluntary global participation and cutting-edge decentralized technologies. While specifics about hardware, rollout timelines, or geographic focus are not yet detailed, the focus remains on building a decentralized, interoperable, and community-managed energy infrastructure enabled by the capital raised.
[1] Daylight's Whitepaper: https://daylight.energy/whitepaper [2] A16z Blog Post: https://a16z.com/2023/03/31/daylight-series-a/
