Puerto Rico-based tea, a company building an open source software platform on the blockchain, secured $8.9M in seed funding. The round was led by Acuitas Group Holdings, with participation from Betaworks Ventures, Percival VC, Round 13 Digital Assets Fund, StrongBlock, and Wax Blockchain. Terren Peizer, the Founder and Chairman of Acuitas Group Holdings, will be joining the tea Board of Directors effective immediately.
tea is building a blockchain open-source toolkit for developers to work on, CI/CD, and deploy on any platform. Led by Max Howell and Timothy Lewis, the creator of Homebrew, the company launched in Q1 2022 with $8M in funding led by Binance Labs. Since its inception, tea has released a whitepaper detailing its protocol for remunerating open-source developers, had over 16,000 developers authenticate, and developed a new unified package manager for open source development.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its development efforts and hire technical talent to continue building its technology infrastructure.
“What we have released so far is what I consider to be the base features that a CLI [command-line interface] tool of its kind should have. It makes thinking about what packages you need secondary to thinking about what you want to achieve — what you want to build. The future of Tea will be in the extensions the community creates to cater the true power of open source to their individual niches.”
Max Howell, CEO and Cofounder of tea, told Techcrunch
According to tea’s whitepaper: — they are proposing “a decentralized system for fairly remunerating open-source developers based on their contributions to the entire ecosystem and enacted through the tea incentive algorithm applied across all entries in the tea registry”. This will entail “digital contracts” that make it easier for companies to sponsor those responsible for key components in their tech stack. The proposed protocol will see package maintainers receive a non-fungible token (NFT) when they complete a package submission, and which is “used to evidence their work and is the key that directs tea rewards”.
