Announcing Glasswing’s Investment in Inrupt: What’s the Killer App?

Today, we are announcing the funding of Inrupt by Glasswing Ventures. While we are announcing the funding today, our partnership with Glasswing goes back several years.

Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures had been working for some years with Tim Berners-Lee on his ideas around Solid and how to make his vision for creating a new paradigm for consumers and businesses a reality. As Tim tells the story, of all the VCs that inbounded him, Rudina and Glasswing were the only VCs that discussed the massive implications of Tim’s vision for the ecosystem rather than the immediate focus on “the killer app.” That marked the beginning of a three-year journey on advancing the open source effort around Solid.

In 2017, it had become clear that the market timing and interest was there to augment the open source effort with a commercial undertaking. Rudina and Tim decided what was needed was a trusted business partner with ‘a particular set of skills’ and their search was underway.

I first met Rudina while I was CEO of Resilient Systems. Rudina’s partner Rick Grinnell had been on my Board there, and she got to watch first-hand as I successfully grew Resilient and ultimately sold the company to IBM. As my tenure at IBM was coming to an end, she called and asked me to meet with Tim, and I was looking forward to dinner and a fascinating conversation.

Well, some weeks after that first dinner and many discussions, Inrupt was kicked into motion.

Who knew that here we’d be, ten months later, co-founders in a startup with a mission to decentralize the web and do our bit to try and change the world for the better - for everyone.

We’re excited to be on the Inrupt journey together, to turbocharge the power and adoption of Solid, the open source web decentralization project designed to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web. Glasswing Ventures’ investment has been instrumental in supporting Inrupt’s platform development and adoption.

A sincere thanks to Rudina and to Glasswing for bringing Tim and me together and for their investment and commitment to Inrupt.

To read Rudina’s blog post, click here.