NEAR established in 2017, Near Protocol boasts a formidable team of over 200 members, including a core group with extensive experience who were previously part of major corporations and organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Consensys, and more. Two of the most prominent key members are Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, visionary figures who have driven NEAR's development and its ecosystem. Here's a brief overview of these two founders:
Alexander Skidanov began his career in 2009 at Microsoft after winning the gold medal at ACM ICPC 2008. In 2011, Alex joined MemSQL (now SingleStore) as the Lead Engineer, where he played a pivotal role in building core features such as storage, sharding, and durability.
Illia Polosukhin boasts over 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google, where he was a key contributor to TensorFlow and managed the team responsible for core search relevance at Google. He is also the author of several notable research papers.
NEAR Protocol has raised a total of over $533.7 million across 8 funding rounds. The project has secured investments from a range of top-tier investment funds in the market, including A16Z, Pantera, Coinbase, Libertus Capital, Fabric Ventures, Xpring, Naval Ravikant, Electric Capital, Accomplice, Amplify, and Multicoin Capital.
Clearly, with its experienced team and strong partnerships, NEAR is poised to secure a top 5 market capitalization spot in the future. For me personally, NEAR under $1.4 is certainly a gift haha. Show Less
