More Users For New Vector’s Open Decentralized Messaging Matrix

The creators of Matrix, New Vector, founded in 2017 is widely acknowledged for the open decentralized communication standard. It led to the adoption and growth of an ecosystem around alternative messaging protocol for instant messaging and VoIP apps. The company raised an $8.5 million Series A funding round.

Notion Capital, Dawn capital along with European seed Fund, Firstminute Capital are a few to be numbered as its investors.

Why is Matrix important?

To offer an open, customizable and secure alternative for messaging, Riot. IM was launched in 2016 that runs on Matrix. Riot offers end to end encryption that makes up for its security.

The freedom that the users of Riot have comes from the choice to run the app on their server giving them full control of data hosting. This includes a bridging feature to integrate with rival chat apps. This brings control with interoperability and transparency.

The instant messaging scenario

“Instant messaging is highly essential for workplace productivity and combining this convenience with total sovereignty and security over data is more valuable as shown by Whatsapp and Slack”, according to Brent Hoberman, settling the discussions on the funding. 

“We have gone backward in developing communication platforms like Slack and Whatsapp where users have great concerns over the security of data shared”, adds Notion Capital’s Jos White. New Vector comes with Matrix protocol that brings an alternative to the market offering open standards and delivering data ownership and security. 

How well does Matrix perform?

With a $5M raised last year, the team took a strategic investment from a crypto wallet app called Status, an Ethereum based secure chat app.

Matrix protocol development was funded by large multinational telecoms infrastructure companies for whom messaging apps were built. As the funding dried up, they were negotiating alternatives, initially pitching supporters for donations.

A couple of years later, with growing momentum, the Matrix network expanded to more than 11M users and 40,000 deployments this year. It has marked a steady growth of 400 % active users since 2018 landing a big portion of VC in the bank.

You will be surprised by the bigwigs who are being roped in to use the Matrix. The US government, the French government, Wikimedia, KDE, and Red Hat are few to be noted. Adding to it are UK’s National Health Service and Mozilla.

Plan B

The plan behind the Series A is to accelerate and scale the hosting platform and explore the product experience and make the protocol able to support more governments and enterprises seeking digital supremacy, autonomous messaging and strong encryption to keep their messages safe in increasingly volatile geopolitical times.

Matrix is intended to come into play where there is a need for highly secure enterprise and public sector users. Centralizing the data could make powerful interests to get them and generate metadata that the controlling entity could data mine. For those with resources to custom fit and deploy their apps, a robust decentralized messaging standard could be an appealing trade-off.

The future of Matrix

Matrix has found an audience with the public sector and adjacent industries ranging from open source projects, cryptocurrencies, activists and NGOs who are keen to communicate securely with government departments, according to New Vector CEO and co-founder, Matthew Hodgson. He insists that the future of the Matrix is bright and promising. It has all the right ingredients for a successful platform. 

The plan for Series A comes in four steps:

Firstly, investing in improving the user experience, secondly, turning on end-to-end encryption by default for all conversations, thirdly funding on Matrix hosting platform and building it into Riot and finally, working on combating abuse. Working out ways for e2e encryption and decentralization helps moderate hateful communications. Matrix helps empower users to filter out content they don’t want to see rather than using algorithms to do it.

Matrix or no Matrix is the question.

Finally, the savior is here for the messaging app market. Matrix could be the answer to most of the problems reported while using chat apps and their security and privacy. Make sure you get the biggest chunk of what the techno world has been developing for the time being. With major industrialists opting for more secure apps, the market is buzzing with activity and innovations are streaming in galore. Experts are watching the game and letting it get the most of all the inventions.