Ephemera just pulled in a $20M Series B, with the kind of investor lineup that makes you double-check if your wallet’s still warm, Union Square Ventures, a16z crypto, and Lightspeed Faction led the charge, with Coinbase Ventures, Sound Ventures, Offline Ventures, and Distributed Global stacking the round. It’s equity, sure, but laced with token warrants, because in Web3, capital and community can’t be strangers.
And let’s not pretend this came out of nowhere. Ephemera has been laying signal-grade groundwork since back when “wallet-to-wallet chat” still sounded like sci-fi. They’re the minds behind XMTP, an open, end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol built for Web3 identities. Not some closed garden like WhatsApp or Signal. This is decentralized comms, identity-native, and chain-agnostic. Think Rust and Go humming under the hood, with wallet-native SDKs dropped in JavaScript and TypeScript, fully open-source and ready to build on.
The company started life as XMTP Labs, but rebranded to Ephemera in July 2024. Why? Because protocol isn’t product, and product isn’t community. And Ephemera’s bet is on the community. It’s not about owning XMTP, it’s about contributing to it until the network stands on its own legs, governed by the people who build on it and benefit from it. That’s not cute, that’s conviction.
Shane Mac is back in the founder seat, years after selling Assist for $50M and shaping social CRM at Conversocial. He’s joined by Matt Galligan, whose startup resume reads like early-internet folklore (SimpleGeo, Circa), and Saul McLeod, aka “saulmc,” pushing product that actually knows how people talk. Nicholas Molnar joined as CTO in 2022, and Ashley Bassett keeps the gears turning as COO. That’s not a founding team, it’s a council of protocol whisperers.
2 million+ connected identities. 60+ apps live. Coinbase’s Base app using XMTP as its native messaging layer. Public testnet since February. Mainnet goes live by year’s end. And Fred Wilson now sitting on the board, because when a protocol starts turning into infrastructure, you want someone who’s already bet on the internet (and won).
The takeaway? Real decentralization doesn’t scream. It builds. Quietly, securely, and in the open. Ephemera isn’t here to replace the old world of messaging, they’re making it obsolete.
