AUSTIN, TX / ACCESSWIRE / October 5, 2022 / Kwil, a decentralized database for data-intensive dApps and Protocols, raised $8.9 million in a seed funding round that was co-led by FTX Ventures, the venture arm of the global cryptocurrency exchange, and Blockchange Ventures, a venture capital firm known for its early investment in NEAR Protocol, Polkadot, Audius, and others. Additional participants in the round included Digital Currency Group, Amplify Partners, Alleycorp, FJ Labs, SevenX Ventures, Genblock Capital, NGC Ventures, and several leading Web3 social, data, and venture organizations. This round comes in addition to an earlier pre-seed round in 2021.

Kwil is a protocol for designing and deploying databases to permissionless networks. By combining the permissionless nature of blockchains with the robust capabilities of existing data stores, Kwil extends the promises of Web3 to more complex, data-intensive applications.

Kwil databases are, by default, permissionless, meaning that application builders can define and deploy rules for interacting with their tables. Just as Ethereum allows for programmable money, Kwil allows for programmable data sets with custom rules dictating how and when users can write to the database. With Kwil, developers can implement logic in their tables to transform database schemas into permissionless protocols. Once a database is deployed, users can openly interact with it according to the schema. Kwil database schemas are created with Kwil's unique data definition language (DDL) specifically designed for permissionless networks.

"The most striking evolution in the Web3 space over the past 18 months has been in the growth of non-financial applications. Recently, we have seen an explosion of Web3 social, gaming, analytics, and science," said Brennan Lamey, founder of Kwil. "In order to build truly innovative products and services in these new sectors, applications require a highly scalable, robust layer on which data-intensive applications can be built and queried. By extending the functionality of permissionless protocols to complex data stores such as SQL databases, Kwil is strongly positioned to underpin the next generation of protocols and further the promise and adoption of decentralized technologies."

The funds will primarily go to expanding Kwil's engineering team and releasing the next version of the product. The company released an initial v1 of its decentralized SQL database in early 2022.

"Kwil's ability to radically accelerate development times and enable data composability across Web3 can allow the protocol to become a key standard for decentralized data querying and storage," said Matt Beck, Director of Investments at Digital Currency Group. "We're thrilled to support the Kwil team as they bring this vision to life."