Tea Reaches Over 16,000 Developers As It Raises $8.9M in Seed Funding

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico--(BUSINESS WIRE)--tea.inc., a new company building an open source software platform on the blockchain, today announced $8.9 million in a second seed funding round, led by Acuitas Group Holdings. Additional investors include Betaworks Ventures, Percival VC, Round 13 Digital Assets Fund, StrongBlock, and Wax Blockchain. Terren Peizer, the Founder and Chairman of Acuitas Group Holdings, will be joining the tea Board of Directors effective immediately.

“Open source has always been the foundation of the internet, with 97% of commercial code containing some open source code,” said co-founder Max Howell, the creator of Homebrew, which grew into the most contributed-to open source software program in the world. “tea’s mission is to empower open-source communities and ensure their contributors are supported as they create the tools that build the internet.”

tea launched in Q1 2022 with $8 million in funding led by Binance Labs. Since its inception, tea has released a whitepaper detailing its protocol for remunerating open-source developers, had over 16,000 developers authenticate, and developed a new unified package manager for open source development.

Given its strong early momentum, this funding will ensure that adequate runway exists to fully develop the tea ecosystem for several years, including by hiring technical talent to continue building tea’s technology infrastructure.

“By adding a leading node services provider, one of the most widely used NFT blockchains in the world, and a leading technology incubator VC to our group of investors, tea has brought together additional blockchain and technology leaders with deep knowledge and strategic insight who will support our mission,” explained co-founder Timothy Lewis.

tea is building a unified package infrastructure for open source development, with its new package manager serving as a universal interpreter and a virtual environment manager. The result of tea’s command line is that developers can:

• Make markdown executable so README files are now executable.
• Ensure teams are working with the same versioning for projects.
• Deal with user permissions and system architecture uniquely and many other processes that run in the background of the graphic user experience.

tea’s unified package manager currently supports Linux and OS X and WSLv2 for Windows with additional support for more operating systems in the near future. Open-source developers interested in contributing code or verifying contributed code can register with tea’s authentication tool.

About tea.inc.

tea.inc. is a Puerto Rico-based corporation that is building the open-source toolkit that makes development possible and builds the internet. Developers can work on any platform, CI/CD on any platform, deploy on any platform; Tea abstracts this detail away so developers can get on with the work that matters. Those interested in joining the team fixing how open-source is funded should reach out through Telegram or Discord at https://linktr.ee/teaxyz.