Umbrel raises $3M in seed round to get a server in every home
Reflections on our journey so far and the road ahead
It all feels like a dream when we look back on our journey over the last year. From an idea to a prototype to a real product with an amazing community and thousands of users all over the world — it’s been a crazy and humbling ride.
Umbrel servers are powering 90% of all the Lightning Network nodes launched over the last year. What’s more exciting is the fact that the world’s most open, fair, and decentralized monetary network isn’t powered by AWS but by “average people” running Bitcoin and Lightning nodes in their homes. People are voting with their feet by participating directly at the protocol layer and not just the application layer, bypassing all intermediaries.
As Umbrel evolves from a Bitcoin and Lightning Network node to a personal server, our mission has never felt more urgent. Surveillance capitalism has plagued the internet, and self-hosting your data on your personal server is the only way to ensure that your data won’t be used against you. Because you never hand it out in the first place.
Today, over 13,000 people are running their personal servers in their homes using Umbrel. Instead of relying on Big Tech, people are taking complete control of their digital lives by self-hosting apps like Nextcloud for file storage, Matrix for messaging, PhotoPrism for media, and more, all on their Umbrel.
The personal computer revolution shifted computing from rooms full of computers (mainframes) owned by corporations to personal computers owned by regular people in their homes. The personal server revolution is shifting computing from rooms full of servers (data centers) owned by corporations to personal servers owned by regular people in their homes.
Over this decade, personal servers will become as ubiquitous as the internet routers today. Our goal is to power this shift by making an incredibly simple yet powerful operating system for running them, and partnering with hardware companies like The Bitcoin Machines to offer plug-and-play Umbrel servers.
Which is why I’m excited to announce that Umbrel has raised $3M in a seed round from an amazing group of investors to help us grow our team and accelerate our development.
This oversubscribed round was led by OSS Capital, with participation from Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, Slow Ventures, Andreas Antonopoulos, Owen Gunden, Max Webster, Stephen Cole, Fulgur Ventures, Mimesis Capital, Huat Ventures, and several other notable investors, in addition to Village Global.
How it all began
Back in 2019, I decided to run a Bitcoin node on my Raspberry Pi computer. I was already running a Bitcoin node on someone else’s computer (aka the “cloud”) but wanted to take my self-sovereignty to the next level.
Once it was up and running, things were never the same. There was an indescribable sense of freedom in self-hosting the Bitcoin blockchain locally and interacting with the network without any third party.
Like a child in a candy shop, I wanted to run everything on my node — a Lightning Network node, a blockchain explorer, an Electrum server. And why stop at just Bitcoin apps? Bitcoin became my gateway drug to the world of self-hosting. Soon, the idea of owning all of my data locally and reducing my reliance on third-party services took over me.
What I was trying to build wasn’t just a Bitcoin node anymore. It was a personal server that could help me de-cloud. I knew just enough of the command line to get my way around. So I looked around for a personal server OS with a GUI that could do it all but found nothing.
My head started racing. I couldn’t sleep. It felt like discovering a hidden secret in plain sight. An opportunity to empower regular, non-technical people to run their personal servers.
I jumped into Figma and quickly designed an early UI prototype of what this OS would look like, focusing only on Bitcoin-related use cases to begin with, and presented it at a small Bitcoin and Lightning meetup in Chiang Mai.
Luke was one of the attendees. We had met a few days before at a Christmas eve party for the first time. He had moved to Thailand from the UK in 2016 to cut down on his living costs to work full-time on his 100+ open source projects.
A few months later, Luke joined me in this journey as my cofounder and Umbrel’s CTO.
I got lucky to have met him right before the pandemic and lockdowns began. Building Umbrel along with Luke has been such a rewarding experience, and looking back, he’s the best cofounder that I could have asked for.
We were building Umbrel because we wanted to use Umbrel ourselves and there was nothing like it. We were our own users from day one, so we kept going, self-funding the development of Umbrel from our savings until recently. Turns out that magic happens if you really believe in something and give it your everything.
We’re hiring
Rebuilding the third generation of the internet from the ground up with first principles is no small task. It’s challenging, but fulfilling. Our most important work lies ahead of us, and you can be a part of it.
We’re hiring across all roles — design, development, marketing, business, operations, community, and support. You can be among the first ten people to join Umbrel, and your work will have a direct impact on shaping Umbrel’s future.
What we care about: talent with a genuine love for your craft and the desire to do meaningful work. What we don’t care about: credentials and degrees.
When you really love what you do, work feels like play. And when work feels like play, you become the best at it. That’s what we’re looking for. If it sounds like you, and our mission resonates with you, email us at jobs@getumbrel.com.
From starting Umbrel to building the product to fundraising, we’ve done it all remotely, and we don’t plan to change it. Our headquarters are on the internet. So you can be based anywhere geographically, from Bay Area to Bangladesh, wherever you feel the most alive.
Thank you
Fundraising is a gratifying signal that we’re on the right track — but it’s a means to an end, not an end itself. The only thing that really matters is building something that people love.
So I want to thank all of our users for believing in us and giving us feedback to improve Umbrel constantly, our amazing community that has contributed code, bug fixes, documentation and more than we can ever return, and our investors for trusting us and helping us make our vision a reality.
Umbrel is an unfinished painting — far from it. We have so much coming up, and I can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Until next time,
Mayank
