Sending Labs, a company that develops decentralized communication products and protocols for developers to add messaging to their Web3 apps, today announced it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding.

Web3, otherwise known as the decentralized web, is built on blockchain technology and uses peer-to-peer transactions to allow separate parties to interact and execute trades without the need for middlemen or centralized authorities. That has given rise to decentralized economies, communities, games, governance and other types of applications.

Sending Labs built its products with the anticipation that decentralized messaging is a fundamental need for Web3 applications. It reaches into what the company sees as a growing gap in the market, where decentralized apps, or dapps, themselves lack internal decentralized messaging capabilities. The company’s products aim to resolve this.

Sigum Capital led the funding round with participation from K3 Ventures, Lingfeng Innovation Fund, UpHonest Capital and Aipollo Investment.

Alongside the funding, the company also launched two flagship products in beta test mode, including a full-featured Web3 encrypted decentralized group chat called SendingMe and a software development kit called SendingNetwork that provides social integrations for decentralized apps.

“We firmly believe that Web3 and decentralized group messaging is the first step to return data ownership back to the user,” said Joe Yu, co-founder and chief executive of Sending Labs. “Closing this funding round and launching our beta simultaneously shows a clear vote of confidence in our products and their potential to spark holistic Web3 growth.”

SendingMe shows the full power of Sending Labs’ capabilities by providing an encrypted group chat platform that allows users, creators and community managers to connect socially in a Web3 ecosystem. It uses smart contracts, which are self-executing programs built on blockchain technology, to provide payments, trade and provide premium services. Such services could be anything from project monetization to peer-to-peer swaps, community marketplaces, crowdfunding, gifting, auctions and token-gated membership.

SendingNetwork allows developers to build rich social integrations into their decentralized Web3 apps. Using the SDK, builders can rapidly add in-app and cross-app chats, and notifications, as well as wallet and decentralized logins. Additionally, they can allow users to transact using cryptocurrency tokens, nonfungible tokens and management features.

The SDK also supports rich communications beyond just text messages, including encrypted voice calls and high-quality video calls, as well as multiuser voice and video calls. It is multiplatform and will work across Web, iOS, Android clients and more.

Both products represent a comprehensive community management toolkit with Web3 features designed to provide users full control of identification data and crypto assets. Communities gain autonomy in interaction and engagement to build and manage their own growth and rewards systems.

Sending Labs funding and product launch at an interesting time for messaging and social networking. Microblogging platform Twitter has been in an uproar since billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company, suspended journalists for covering news about Musk and closed free access to its application user interface, making it more difficult for developers to build on it. Those controversies have driven users to explore alternatives, such as the decentralized social network Mastodon.

Image: Sending Labs