Helium Network Rebrands To Nova Labs, Raises $200m in Series D

Helium Inc., the development team behind the Helium decentralized wireless network (HNT), has announced that it will change its trade name to Nova Labs going forward.

The announcement coincides with the firm’s recently closed Series D investment round, which saw $200 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tiger Global, Seven Seven Six, GV (Google Ventures), Liberty Global, NGP Capital, Goodyear Ventures, and Deutsche Telekom, among others. This latest round has raised the firm’s estimated valuation at $1.2 billion. This round was focused on equity instead of tokens, as compared to its $111 million funding round in August 2021, which was also led by a16z.

Co-founded in 2013 by Shawn Fanning and Amir Haleem, Helium was originally a wireless network designed for Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as trackers or sensors. Over time, the network was developed into a blockchain-based token incentives platform which rewarded users with the HNT token for supporting the network by sharing their home internet connection through a Helium node. Having grown from 14,000 active nodes just last year, the network now has 680,000 nodes.

“[Helium] is actually the people’s network. We really wanted to change our name to create a clear distinction that we don’t own the network. We are the creators and founders, but we open-sourced it, and it’s important to recognize that the people are the ones that are tirelessly growing and maintaining the network,” shares Nova Labs COO Frank Mong.

Going forward, Nova Labs will be a separate business entity from Helium, which will now refer to the community-run, open source crypto wireless network. The community was a unique project, in that crypto tokens were turned into a decentralized wireless network fueld by token incentives. Nova Labs will be headed by the founders and core contributors behind the Helium network.

With the name change, the Helium trademark is now granted solely to the Decentralized Wireless Alliance, which itself will be renamed to The Helium Foundation, a community-selected governing body behind the network which functions much like a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) overseeing key protocol improvement proposals.

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