Decentralized identity startup Intuition raises $4m funding round

Decentralized infrastructure provider Intuition has raised $4 million in a seed round fundraise led by Superscrypt. The raise comes as Intuition approaches the public launch of its protocol and first applications later this year.

Intuition lets users create attestations about any subject, storing the information in such a way that it's easily navigable, queryable, and leveraged by other applications. Intuition's founder, Ethereum veteran Billy Luedtke, explains that the protocol was created to capture the wisdom of crowds about everything, while making that wisdom available and open to everyone.

Jacob Ko, Partner, Superscrypt:  "Today, determining truth to make informed decisions is a complex and difficult task. Information is largely concentrated in big tech platforms, search and curation algorithms are opaque, and identity and reputation standards are too fragmented to provide strong signals. Intuition's approach of incentivizing crowdsourced knowledge and opinions from users in a globally inclusive and decentralized way will fuel better understanding of any person, ID or topic. It has the potential to change the way we disseminate, consume and understand information and we're excited to back a team with deep experience working on data interoperability and digital identity."

Other participants in the round include Shima Capital, Avon Ventures, WW Ventures, Matrixport Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and ConsenSys, along with several other VC, DAO, and angel investors. This round follows a fundraise last November co-led by Andrew Keys, founder of DARMA Capital, and Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys.

Whereas decentralized identity has largely focused on high sensitivity credentials, like KYC and the identities of people, Intuition facilitates robust decentralized identity that pertains to all things.

William Luedtke, Founder  and CEO, Intuition: "Nearly everything can and should have decentralized identifiers (DIDs). Whether that's a person, pseudonym, web3 product, organization, or even a news article. We presently rely on a fundamentally flawed system of siloed, centralized platforms such as Yelp, LinkedIn, and Twitter to inform our intuition about the world around us. These platforms shape our perception with fragmented, incomplete, and occasionally misleading information."

As a protocol, Intuition doesn't take a view on whether something is true or false, but instead captures and shows what people are saying about a thing. By allowing people to freely share their opinions about any subject, and verifiably attaching that data to DIDs in an open knowledge graph, Luedtke hopes to improve the reputation and identity data that we societally have access to regarding the things we're interacting with every day.

Alex Lin, Head of Research and Investor, Shima Capital: "Our digital identities form the bedrock of a flourishing data-driven economy and society. However, the vast reservoir of digital knowledge on the internet still exists in a disparate and incomplete state. For a future free from these fractured conditions, we require purpose-built infrastructure that fosters the creation and seamless access to consolidated, trustworthy, and permissionless information. Anchored by an exceptional team, Intuition harnesses web3 primitives to align ownership and incentives, driving forward this transformative vision. I am thrilled to support their journey towards this exciting future."

Intuition's protocol and middleware allow developers to easily integrate the company's attestations and knowledge graph into their own applications. Intuition will initially launch with a knowledge graph explorer built atop the protocol, and will directly display human-readable data regarding wallet addresses inside popular web wallets.

www.intuition.systems