The software developer company Decentralized Engineering Corporation (DEC), has raised $9 million in seed funding in a bid to compete with Uber and Lyft, established ride-sharing apps. 

DEC, which developed the ride-sharing app Teleport, will utilize the proceeds to further develop Teleport. The project is based on Solana and powered by DEC’s TRIP protocol. 

According to founder, Paul Bohm, Teleport looks to address a portion of the headwinds looked at by traditional ride-sharing, giving control back to customers and drivers. Bohm further stated, “We're giving ownership to anyone who brings people using the protocol because the protocol should reward the people building it well,” Bohm stated. 

Thomas Bailey at Road Capital and Steve Vassallo at Foundation Capital co-led the seed funding round. Among other strategic investors that joined the round included Josh Mohrer, who was the ex-general manager of Uber New York. 

Teleport’s application is supposed to be live at the end of the final quarter of this year, the company said in a statement on October 27. It will be shown at two places in the following months- the Solana  Breakpoint event in November, as well as at Art Basel in Miami this December. 

“By turning ride-sharing into a protocol, Teleport is building what we couldn’t build at Uber in 2010, and what Uber should be building today,” Ryan McKillen, a former product manager and software engineer at Uber who also participated in Teleport's seed funding, said in the statement. “Riders and drivers will migrate from centralized middlemen to an open economy with aligned economic incentives."