Acuitas Group Holdings was the lead investor in Tea’s most recent seed round, which also included Betaworks Ventures, Percival VC, Round 13 Digital Assets Fund, StrongBlock, and Wax Blockchain.
Tea, an open source unified package management for software developers, today revealed it has added additional $8.9 million in early capital to its coffer.
Max Howell, the person behind the well-known open source package management Homebrew, and Timothy Lewis are the minds behind Tea. The two started Tea in Puerto Rico in November, and it came out of stealth mode in March thanks to $8 million in funding from illustrious supporters, including the venture capital arm of cryptocurrency juggernaut Binance.
The business has made sweeping declarations about how it intends to leverage the blockchain with a new web3 protocol to facilitate the payment of open source software producers and maintainers. This will involve “digital contracts,” which make it simpler for businesses to sponsor those in charge of important parts of their tech stack.
Tea is currently concentrating on the initial version of the product, which was released last month to compete with other well-known package management players including GitHub-owned NPM and Homebrew itself.
Tea promises to be more than just a straightforward package manager: it will also be a “universal” interpreter, a virtual environment manager, and a package manager. But above all else, it is flexible, allowing organisations and developers to modify it to suit their own requirements.
Although the future appears bright, the largest game-changer in this situation is probably backing open source developers in their pursuit of compensation. Tea’s intimate ties to the cryptocurrency world, though, might give some people pause, especially in light of the high-profile instability brought on by the FTX collapse. A non-fungible token (NFT), which is “used to evidence their effort and is the key that directs tea awards,” will be given to package maintainers as part of Tea’s proposed protocol in addition to the participation of prominent investors like Binance, the white paper states.
But the topic of payments has frequently come up in the open source community, especially in light of notorious security issues like Log4Shell. Any method that can support a strong software supply chain, which is ultimately what businesses need, is likely to be of interest. Tea’s new protocol won’t be ready for use until some time in 2023, though the company has no specific date in mind for that.
