The Decentralized Engineering Corporation (DEC), which developed ride-sharing app Teleport, has raised $9 million in seed funding in a bid to compete with established ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft.
DEC, a software developer, will use the proceeds to further grow Teleport, which is powered by DEC’s TRIP protocol. The project is built on Solana.
Teleport seeks to address some of the headwinds faced by traditional ride sharing, giving control back to drivers and customers, according to its founder, Paul Bohm. “We’re giving ownership to anyone who brings people using the protocol, because the protocol should reward the people building it well,” Bohm told CoinDesk.
The seed funding was co-led by Steve Vassallo at Foundation Capital and Thomas Bailey at Road Capital. Additional strategic investors that joined the round included Josh Mohrer, who was previously a general manager of Uber New York.
Teleport’s app is expected to be live at the end of the fourth quarter of this year, the company said in a statement Thursday. It will be piloted at Solana’s Breakpoint event in November, as well as at Art Basel in Miami this December.
“By turning ride-sharing into a protocol, Teleport is building what we couldn’t build at Uber in 2010, and what Uber should be building today,” Ryan McKillen, a former product manager and software engineer at Uber who also participated in Teleport’s seed funding, said in the statement. “Riders and drivers will migrate from centralized middlemen to an open economy with aligned economic incentives.”
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