LINKSPREED GROUP Confirms First Portfolio Company for GRAVITY 51 — Transition to Be Completed This Year
Group-wide R&D programme starts in September 2026 under Y-LAB; company name and full details to be announced at the end of the year.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
United States — September 1, 2026 — LINKSPREED GROUP today announced that GRAVITY 51, the early-stage venture arm operating inside Y-LAB, the Group’s research and innovation division, will take on its first portfolio company. The transition of that company into GRAVITY 51 is scheduled to be completed before the end of this calendar year.
In line with the GRAVITY 51 model, the Group acquires a 51% majority stake, while the founding team retains a stake and continues to run the business. Work on the joint programme begins in September 2026 — still within the third quarter — and is expected to gain full momentum, with substantially more information released, in late Q4 2026.
The exact name of the company, the industry it operates in, and the detailed technical and commercial specifics will only be announced at the end of the year. Until then, LINKSPREED GROUP will not comment on the identity of the venture or the terms of the transaction.
A first mandate with unusual ambition: building a new hyperscaler for an entire industry
This transaction is not structured as a conventional early-stage investment. The first GRAVITY 51 portfolio company will not be operated as an isolated asset. It becomes the nucleus of a long-horizon research and engineering programme whose objective is to build a new hyperscaler for one specific industry — a vertically specialised, full-stack platform layer providing the compute, identity, data and application infrastructure that this industry does not have today.
Instead of renting capability from existing general-purpose cloud providers, the programme is built on the principles that have guided the Group’s Web4 architecture from the start: infrastructure belongs as close to the user as possible, identity should be sovereign and held on the device, and platforms should not depend on a single central authority that can switch them off.
Because a mandate of this scope cannot be delivered on a quarterly product cycle, the initiative has deliberately been placed inside Y-LAB, the Group’s research division, rather than inside a commercial business unit. Y-LAB exists for exactly this class of work: multi-year, higher-risk, deep-technology programmes measured in research and architecture milestones rather than short-term revenue.
Marc Herdina, Founder and CEO of LINKSPREED, said:
“GRAVITY 51 was never meant to be a portfolio of logos. It is a mechanism to take a company that is early, ambitious and genuinely hard to build — and to give it the one thing early ventures almost never have: the full technology stack, the infrastructure and the engineering depth of an entire group standing behind it from day one. Our first portfolio company is exactly that kind of company. We are not acquiring a product. We are starting a programme, and we are starting it in our research division because that is where work of this length belongs.”
Every GROUP-based working group participates in the R&D effort
The programme is structured as a Group-wide R&D collaboration. All GROUP-based working groups take part, each contributing its own specialisation to the new platform:
- LSP — core group engineering and platform operations, contributing to the foundational service architecture of the programme.
- LINKSPREED — the Group’s social networking and community platform organisation, contributing productised platform experience, scaling know-how and the operational learnings from running social infrastructure as a managed service.
- ATRIUM — contributing backend-less platform architecture. ATRIUM’s approach to building social and community platforms without traditional backend databases — handling identity, authentication and data storage natively — feeds directly into the new industry platform, particularly around compliance, data minimisation and resilience against fake and automated accounts.
- UIID — the Group’s decentralised, on-device unique identity standard, expected to provide the identity and authentication substrate for the programme, enabling context-specific aliases, user-held data sovereignty and single-identity access across the ecosystem without a central credential store.
- DEV.UNITY — the Group’s next-generation internet protocol organisation, contributing foundational networking and data-transfer research, including work on efficient and secure alternatives to legacy addressing and transport layers.
- Further GROUP working groups, whose individual workstream assignments will be detailed in the end-of-year announcement.
This cross-organisational setup is central to the GRAVITY 51 thesis. A company entering GRAVITY 51 is connected into the broader Web4 ecosystem rather than run in isolation, and receives access to technology, infrastructure and expertise from across the wider organisation.
Marc Herdina added:
“A single startup cannot build a hyperscaler. A group can. That is why every relevant working group is at the table from the very first sprint — LSP, LINKSPREED, ATRIUM, UIID, DEV.UNITY and the others. The founders keep their vision and keep running their business. We bring the stack, the infrastructure and the people.”
What GRAVITY 51 is
GRAVITY 51 is part of Y-LAB, the Group’s research and innovation division, and is focused on early-stage venture activity within the Web4 ecosystem.
Through GRAVITY 51, external companies at an early, higher-risk stage of development are acquired with a 51% stake. This approach allows the Group to support promising ventures while retaining a majority interest in their future direction.
Once part of GRAVITY 51, these companies are connected into the broader Web4 ecosystem and given access to the resources needed to grow — including technology, infrastructure and expertise from across the wider organisation.
What happens after GRAVITY 51 takes a majority stake
| Dimension | Approach |
|---|---|
| Integration | The company is connected into the broader Web4 ecosystem rather than run in isolation. |
| Support provided | Access to the Group’s technology, infrastructure and expertise. |
| Ownership | GRAVITY 51 holds 51%, so the founding team retains a stake and continues to run the business. |
Timeline
| Period | Milestone |
|---|---|
| September 2026 (Q3) | Programme start. Joint R&D workstreams open across the participating GROUP working groups; onboarding into the Web4 ecosystem begins. |
| Q4 2026 | Transition completed. The company formally becomes the first member of the GRAVITY 51 portfolio. |
| Late Q4 2026 | Programme reaches full momentum. Public disclosure of the company name, the target industry, the platform scope and the detailed roadmap. |
| 2027 and beyond | Long-term research and build-out phase within Y-LAB, with milestone-based updates. |
LINKSPREED GROUP notes that no further details — including company name, sector, location or financial terms — will be shared before the end-of-year announcement.
Why a research division, and why now
The decision to anchor this initiative in Y-LAB reflects a specific view of how durable infrastructure is created. Industry-specific platform layers are not built within a single funding cycle. They require sustained protocol work, identity architecture, hardware-aware design and regulatory groundwork long before any commercial surface can be exposed.
By placing the first GRAVITY 51 company inside the research division, LINKSPREED GROUP is making three commitments explicit:
- Patience over pressure. The venture is assessed against research and architecture milestones, not premature revenue targets.
- Shared infrastructure over duplication. The company builds on the Group’s existing Web4 foundations — identity, decentralised compute, protocol research and platform tooling — instead of rebuilding them from scratch.
- Founder continuity. With 51% held by GRAVITY 51, the founding team keeps equity and operational leadership, so the original vision stays intact while the Group supplies scale.
For founders: how to reach GRAVITY 51
GRAVITY 51 continues to review early-stage ventures operating in or adjacent to the Web4 ecosystem.
Founders can pitch directly at [email protected].
LINKSPREED GROUP will publish more information on how to become a GRAVITY 51 project, including criteria, process and expectations, in a future release. Further documentation is available at help.linkspreed.com.
About Y-LAB
Y-LAB is the research and innovation division of LINKSPREED GROUP. It hosts the Group’s long-horizon, higher-risk programmes — from protocol and identity research to early-stage venture activity through GRAVITY 51 — and is structured to pursue multi-year technical objectives that sit deliberately outside normal commercial product cycles.
About LINKSPREED GROUP
LINKSPREED GROUP is building Web4, the social-network-based internet: a decentralised, privacy-first architecture spanning platforms, protocols, artificial intelligence and hardware. The Group’s ecosystem includes social network platform services and enterprise community platforms, open-source and self-hostable editions, AI models and tooling for community and content operations, free SaaS initiatives for businesses and consumers, decentralised edge compute and Web4-native consumer hardware, alongside foundational protocol and identity work through DEV.UNITY and UIID. LINKSPREED GROUP operates as a globally distributed, fully remote organisation with a Zero Trust security posture across its platforms and internal processes.
Learn more: linkspreed.com · web4.community · uiid.me · help.linkspreed.com
Press contact
LINKSPREED GROUP United States [email protected] Documentation: help.linkspreed.com
Forward-looking statements
This release contains forward-looking statements regarding planned transactions, research programmes, timelines and product ambitions, including the completion of the transition in 2026 and the intended end-of-year disclosure. Such statements reflect current intentions and are subject to change. Research-stage initiatives carry inherent technical, commercial and execution risk, and no assurance is given that any described outcome, timeline or capability will be achieved. Nothing in this release constitutes an offer of securities or an invitation to invest.