Daylight, an avant-garde decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) dedicated to revolutionizing energy distribution, has successfully secured $9 million in a Series A funding round, spearheaded by A16z Crypto.

Rapid Fundraising and Esteemed Investors

Additional investors contributing to this round include Framework Ventures, Lattice Fund, Escape Velocity, and Lerer Hippeau, as disclosed by Daylight on Wednesday. The fundraising was executed expeditiously within a span of 10 days in April, as detailed by co-founder and CEO Jason Badeaux to The Block. Badeaux refrained from commenting on the specifics of the round’s structure, valuation, or whether any investors have obtained advisory or directorial board positions.

This Series A round escalates Daylight’s cumulative funding to $13 million, following a prior acquisition of $4 million in seed funding during the summer of 2022, Badeaux noted.

Genesis of Daylight

Incepted in 2022 by Jason Badeaux, Udit Patel, and Evan Caron—all possessing substantial experience in the energy sector—Daylight aims to tackle burgeoning electricity demand.

“It was evident in 2022 that electricity demand was poised to surge due to compute growth, electrification, and reshoring of industrial capacity. The conventional grid expansion model posed a constraint to meeting this demand,” Badeaux conveyed to The Block. “Constructing transmission infrastructure is virtually infeasible; thus, innovative methods to optimize energy growth are imperative, with distributed energy being paramount.”

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Daylight’s Decentralized Protocol

Daylight is architecting a decentralized protocol enabling users to connect their energy apparatuses, such as thermostats, batteries, electric vehicles, and solar inverters, to its application and earn rewards. Additionally, users can participate in the Daylight marketplace to procure energy enhancements for their domiciles or edifices, including solar panels, electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps, and hot water heaters. The marketplace currently operates in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, with imminent expansion to Texas and California.

Badeaux elaborated that the protocol consolidates capacity derived from the flexibility of connected devices and renders it accessible to energy corporations. “Furthermore, the protocol’s proprietary energy data can facilitate the development of innovative applications, such as voltage monitoring to mitigate electrical fire risks for property insurance.”

Reward Mechanisms and Business Model

Daylight bestows rewards in the form of points, redeemable within the application. When probed about the potential conversion of these points into Daylight’s proprietary token, Badeaux opted not to comment.

Explaining Daylight’s business model, Badeaux elucidated that the protocol will vend energy data and capacity to end customers across and beyond the energy sector.

“Energy, currently dominated by highly regulated monopolies in the U.S., is primed for disruption,” opined a16z partners Guy Wuollet and Ali Yahya in a blog post shared with The Block. “Daylight is crafting a decentralized protocol that will enable developers to program the energy grid through distributed energy resources.”

Technical Foundations and Future Prospects

Daylight is constructing its protocol on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase. The protocol has been launched in testnet, with Badeaux declining to disclose the mainnet launch timeline.

“Analogous to renewable energy credits or energy efficiency credits, the Daylight Protocol will incentivize users for contributing energy capacity to its open-source network,” Badeaux articulated. “The protocol will cultivate an economy centered around its energy capacity and data, fostering interactions between energy companies and developers with the infrastructure.