Unlocking Some Exciting News

We’re growing our talented and mission-driven team. Come join us!

By Julien Genestoux on

At Unlock, we’re on a mission to fix the web. Unlock empowers each and every creator in the world and helps them find ways to monetize without relying on a middleman. It’s a protocol — and not a centralized platform that controls everything that happens on it. We want to help value spread more easily not through convoluted user tracking or clickbait. It’s about taking back subscription and access from the domain of middlemen — from a million tiny silos and a handful of gigantic ones — and transforming it into a fundamental business model for the web.

I’ve spent my career building for the open web, whether for Superfeedr (acquired by Medium in 2016) or at Medium where I worked on SEO, syndication protocols and cryptocurrencies, or through the WebSub protocol which I wrote for the W3C.

💸 Empowering our team

Today, I am proud to say that Unlock has closed a pre-seed round of funding led by General Catalyst and by Cherry Ventures and with participations from Consensys Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Betaworks, 122 West, La Famiglia, Coinbase Ventures and a group of stellar business angels. It’s an honor to have each of these partners on board and we’re excited to have their expertise as we grow.

🤗 Expanding our team

I am also excited to say that Unlock is becoming a “we”: my friend Ben Werdmuller is joining Unlock as our first hire. There are very few people who can make such an impact on an early stage company: Ben is a talented engineer with a very rich experience building products and leading open source projects such as Known or Elgg.

This new funding will also help Ben and I build a world-class team of talented and creative minds to build this new business model for the web. We’d love you to join us: here’s some more detail as to what we’re looking for, currently.

👨‍💻 Contributing to our team

Finally, today, we’re opening up our Github account which includes all of the code that we have written so far for Unlock. Anyone who’s released open source code knows what this means: the code will be inspected, audited and judged… but it will also be improved and anyone can make suggestions, open issues or even contribute fixes, documentations and more. We’re excited to welcome you to the Unlock community!

We’re on a mission to fix the web. We’re proud to announce our new investor partners and we believe we have big ideas to take us to the next stage — we’d love you to join us!