A few years ago (when QUIC was coming out) I was developing the theory of a new transport/encryption/authentication protocol. The focus was as much on transport as in the built-in federated authentication.
There was not much interest in the field and I had a lot of the theory and formal proofs, but no implementation.
This month I found a cofounder and we are reordering a lot of the information and presentation, we should start asking for funds in more or less a month.
I still believe my solution to be much more complete than anything in use today (again: on paper), but since there seems to be some interest today, I'll ask here: Can anyone suggest some seed funds to check for a starttup? We will be based half US, half EU.
For more details, fenrirproject.org (again: old stuff there, ignore the broken code)
Very interesting stuff, but not going to lie, I have trouble imagining how you'd build a viable company around this kind of thing.
Infrastructure/protocol companies are always going to be a very tough sell (Sandstorm) unless there's a compelling freemium model like with GitLab, Cloudbees, Sentry, etc.
The infrastructure/protocol will need to remain open, since this kind of thing works better the bigger the user base is. it will probably spin off to its own foundation as soon as it is viable.
The income will come from another project built directly on this, on managing the domain and its users/devices, plus other stuff, mainly for businesses.
I don't see much need to go into details right now, but we have a clear distinction in mind between what is infrastructure and what will be the product.
Again, still in the housekeeping phase, just looking for potential future funds once we finish this phase
yeah, thank you for the kind comments about not needing money (aka: my time as no value) and asking me to build the prototype with irony.
As I said, the project was started a few years back, and since I did not have the time to work on it, maybe it means my life does not give me the time and money to build this on the side.
But I'll always find it funny how half of the people go "you need to have solid theory proofs before" and the other half goes "where is the working code".
As I said we just started some housekeeping and are not ready to start, and as many point out, it's hard to make money on infrastructure. I know, I did not ask how to make money on this. The idea is to keep the base as open as possible and make money on other service built on this. I was only asking on pointers to funds interested on tech loosely connected to this. And if they don't like our current state or something else fine, no need for you to do their job, and in a witty way, too.
> yeah, thank you for the kind comments about not needing money (aka: my time as no value) and asking me to build the prototype with irony
The world (read: the investment community) doesn’t care about your time though. If you are going to pitch an infrastructure project that should work in software without a working demo, you’re going to have to take a huge haircut on valuation.
If you want to be successful with a theory and proofs, join academia and publish them. If you want to get investors for infrastructure, make something that works.
Academia churns out “protocols on paper” every year that go absolutely nowhere. You need to differentiate yourself if you’re looking for more than a research grant.
Doubtful anyone is going to throw money at you for some random idea, that you won’t even invest some of your free time on. You clearly don’t value it, so no one else will.
I'm just going to mention that NATS can be used as a general purpose transport, with encryption and a surprisingly capable authentication and authorization system. It also supports federating into clusters and superclusters. NATS has also come a long way in the last several years, in case anyone is thinking of some experiences they had years ago when it didn't have all these features.
The question would have to be "what does your idea/project offer that NATS doesn't already offer?"
I have no affiliation with NATS, but I wish that people were paying more attention to it. It solves a lot of problems people have.
There was not much interest in the field and I had a lot of the theory and formal proofs, but no implementation.
This month I found a cofounder and we are reordering a lot of the information and presentation, we should start asking for funds in more or less a month.
I still believe my solution to be much more complete than anything in use today (again: on paper), but since there seems to be some interest today, I'll ask here: Can anyone suggest some seed funds to check for a starttup? We will be based half US, half EU.
For more details, fenrirproject.org (again: old stuff there, ignore the broken code)