Navigate (NVG8), a community platform powering a data ownership ecosystem, has announced its project launch and close of a $7.625 million seed round. The round was led by Distributed Global, with added investments from Alan Howard, Kraken Ventures, Jez Mohideen, Outlier Ventures, and others.

The seed round comes in conjunction with the appointment of Amir Husain, Founder, and CEO of SparkCognition, and Rumi Morales, Director of Investments at Digital Currency Group, as founding members of the Navigate Board of Directors.

Built on the Polygon Network, Navigate aims to be the ultimate destination for contributing, sourcing, and monetizing data. The blockchain ecosystem will democratize high-value, tokenized information, known as next-generation data (NGD)—data that is rich with insights but currently underutilized.

“Every day, each of us generates immense amounts of data about ourselves and our surroundings, and up until now, we haven’t had any way to monetize it. Navigate effectively answers the long-standing question of how we can contribute this digital data in a meaningful way. The Navigate platform offers a method of selling the data we generate to those building the applications of tomorrow, all while rewarding contributors and preserving the privacy and sovereignty of data provided by those users.”
– Rumi Morales, Board Director of Navigate

Navigate has two distinct layers: the Navigate Marketplace and Navigate dApps.

• Navigate Marketplace consists of vaults for crowdsourcing large, high-quality data sets and a peer-to-peer exchange for users to mint and trade next-generation data.
• Navigate dApps provides developers with APIs to build decentralized applications and power these products by leveraging the data assets listed on the marketplace.

First dApp

Navigate Maps, a high-resolution, low-altitude (HRLA) map of major cities will be the platform’s first app.

Addressing the gaps in today’s traditional satellite-based map offerings, Navigate Maps will be a high-quality, community-owned map application that is constantly updated using data uploaded by users.

Navigate Maps will provide value to end-users, while also showing developers and organizations the potential of building on Navigate, leveraging data uploaded by the Navigate community.

Token (NVG8)

NVG8, the platform’s native ERC-20 token will be used to incentivize participation in the platform, including contributing data and building dApps.