Andrena, the team behind DAWN, raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Dragonfly and with participation from CMT Digital, Castle Island Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, 6th Man Ventures and ParaFi.
A total of $33 million was raised.
Andrena collaborates with Professor Pramod Viswanath from Princeton University, who is one of the founders Sentient is an AI development platform that raised $85 million in July 2024.
Twitterscore - 13, small. Dragonfly is following, as well as people from Coinbase and Paradigm.
Team
Judging by LinkedIn the team consists of more than 40 people with an office in New York.
The company is “old”, existing since 2016. They are engaged in providing cheap broadband Internet in the USA. They came to DePIN from the real sector.
Neil Chatterjee (Neil Chatterjee) - CEO of Andrena and DAWN. Education: Princeton and New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is followed by a number of crypto influencers on Twitter. For the last 8 years he has been working at Andrena (co-founder).
James Smits - COO and co-founder of Andrena and DAWN. Education: Graduate School and Princeton University. Investor in EI Capital. Before that, he was a partner in various investment firms. Cryptans are not interested in his Twitter.
Competitors
Grass is a very similar project to Solana, catching AI and DePI N narratives, which raised $4.5 million.
The difference is that DAWN is now at an early stage and has collected more investments. It will probably follow the Grass path, launching nodes.
Meson.Network — protocol for providing Internet bandwidth on Ethereum. Chinese protocol, with Chinese Tier 2 funds. Raised $12.25 million.
Came out with ~FDV $270 million in May and then collapsed to the current $11 million - the investment amount. MSN is currently in the accumulation phase on Dropstab.
It will be possible to roughly evaluate DAWN when Grass is released. For now, we can assume an estimate of FDV of ~$200-400 million.
Activities
Now you can farm points by installing the extension .
- Install DAWN Validator: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dawn-validator-chrome-ext/fpdkjdnhkakefebpekbdhillbhonfjjp
- Register in the extension (there are referrals)
- Authorize and go to boost
- Subscribe to X
- Join Discord
- Subscribe to Telegram
A few nuances:
- On Gmail I didn’t receive codes (I used Yandex). Check it out for yourself.
- The project is not being developed as actively as Grass - currently 70 thousand installations of the extension.
- Activity without costs (if installed on a home computer)
- If you are afraid for security (although there were no problems), install the browser extension on the server. But then there will already be investments.
Result
From the activities of the company and its leaders it is clear that the guys not hardened cryptans, but people interested in providing the Internet and the real physical implementation of the project. The project is at an early stage. Perhaps, by analogy with Grass, they will launch their own nodes.
Solana has recently gained enormous popularity and projects in its ecosystem have a chance to grow.
