I just had a great conversation with Datum CEO Zachary Smith. His latest venture, Datum, just announced a $13.6 million funding round to tackle something most of us don’t think about: access to the fundamental primitives of the internet.
While hyperscalers like AWS and Google have built massive empires on cloud infrastructure, there’s a whole new wave of builders—AI companies, data clouds, specialized compute platforms—who need direct access to networking primitives but find the interfaces “simply too complicated.”
Datum is betting that the internet is getting reinvented around AI, and they want to give this new generation of cloud companies the same powerful networking tools that have historically been locked away behind complex legacy systems.
The “Ex-Battery Mafia” Leans In
Zac started by incubating the idea with Alex Benik, who had recently left Battery Ventures to start his own single-operator fund called Encoded. They spent six to eight months just figuring out if they were “in the right zone” and if they could actually pull this off. As Zac told us:
“I got a lot of gray hair. So I’m kind of thinking, hey, do I have this in me? And do I know how to build in this modern weird age?”
In January 2024, they put together a $3 million pre-seed round, which Zachary describes as being assembled by what he calls the “ex-Battery Mafia”—Alex from Encoded and Sunil from Amplify, who led the round. The seed extension, led by Reid Christian at CRV (another ex-Battery connection who had cold-called Zachary back in 2015), brought the total to over $13 million. Included in that total were supporting checks from folks like Zoe Weinberg from ex/ante, Will from Step Function (focused on local-first technologies), and Vine Ventures (New York-based for local support).
The Splinternet Is Real—And It’s Accelerating
Zac shared the big macro shift behind why they started the company:
“You may have heard the term the splinternet… You’ve got different rules in different states here in the United States about what content could be shown where. You have different countries. It used to just be China, but now Russia and Indonesia and all kinds of places.”
The boom in sovereign AI clouds is creating new barriers—or as Zachary more diplomatically puts it, “rules and restrictions, policies related to AI data.” His prediction? A significant portion of the internet is going to be private and more curated.
Zac shared some data that beared this out. Two times the amount of traffic goes through the private internet compared to the public internet today. And he believes this will only accelerate as companies need to comply with the complexity around privacy and regulation.
Building in the Open—Because It Takes a Village
Perhaps the most distinctive thing about Datum’s approach is their commitment to open source. The entire platform is GPL-licensed, and they’re working on everything in the open.
When I asked Zacary what he’d ask of the founder and investor community, his answer was clear:
“My number one thing is to lean into community. I feel that right now we have this opportunity not to compete as much as collaborate.”
He talked about the early days of NANOG and peering forums, where even competitors would work together to build a better internet. He even worked with DigitalOcean (who I worked for in a past life!) to interconnect networks when he was running a prior startup, Packet, despite competing in parts of the market.
It’s a refreshing perspective in an era where “winner take all” has become the default assumption. Datum is betting that the new wave of cloud operators—whether they’re scale data clouds like Snowflake and Databricks, new inference clouds, or specialized AI infrastructure—will need ways to work together.
Want to hear more? Watch the full conversation above to dive deeper into Datum’s technical architecture, Zachary’s thoughts on partnering with companies like Cloudflare, and why he believes the next wave of cloud infrastructure will look fundamentally different from what we have today.
