It is our pleasure to welcome Umbrel to the Fulgur Ventures portfolio. Umbrel began in 2019 when co-founder Mayank Chhabra set out to run a Bitcoin node on a Raspberry Pi and discovered, like many before him, that the experience was needlessly painful. At a Bitcoin meetup in Chiang Mai he met Luke Childs, a veteran open-source developer, and together they launched Umbrel in August 2020. The project is now headquartered in Bangkok and has become one of the most beloved pieces of software in the Bitcoin world.

Umbrel is, at its core, a personal home cloud and operating system for self-hosting. With umbrelOS and the plug-and-play Umbrel Home device, anyone can run their own Bitcoin and Lightning node, store files and photos, stream media with Jellyfin, run Nextcloud, block ads network-wide, and install hundreds of other apps from the Umbrel App Store with a single click. At one point Umbrel powered roughly 90 percent of all newly spun-up Lightning nodes globally, an extraordinary stat for any piece of consumer software.

This matters for reasons that go far beyond convenience. A Bitcoin network is only as sovereign as the number of people willing to run their own node, and a Lightning network is only as resilient as the diversity of its operators. By making self-hosting genuinely delightful, Umbrel directly strengthens the decentralization of the system Fulgur exists to advance.

Mayank, Luke, and the Umbrel team have built a product with the kind of design taste, open-source ethos, and grassroots loyalty that compounds for decades. We are proud to support them as they continue to make personal sovereignty, in money, data, and computing, available to everyone.