Data-sharing platform Vendia raises $30M Series B – TechCrunch
Vendia, a blockchain-based platform that makes it easier for businesses to share their code and data with partners across apps, platforms and clouds, announced today that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by NewView Capital. Neotribe Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Aspenwood Ventures and BMW iVentures also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to $50 million.
The company was founded by two AWS veterans: AWS Lambda inventor Tim Wagner and former AWS chief blockchain officer Shruthi Rao. Since launching Vendia, the company has added new customers like BMW, Aerotrax, and Slalom, who use it to have a single source of truth for their multi-cloud data sharing with some of their partners. As Wagner noted, the company has so far focused primarily on the financial services, travel and hospitality sectors, but with the new funding it will likely look to expand into new areas as well. vertical sectors. Wagner also noted that the company recently launched a new product line around CRM data sharing and since the company is seeing a lot of traction around its file sharing capabilities, it’s also investing in that as well.
Currently, Vendia supports AWS and the team recently launched Azure support as well. Support for Google Cloud Platform is on the roadmap, in addition to the company’s ongoing work to enable its service to connect to an ever-growing number of services.
The fact that it uses a blockchain to do this is somewhat secondary to this (and the company barely mentions it on its homepage), but it’s what allows the company to offer ledger without immutable server to its users to guarantee the accuracy of the data as well as the provenance and traceability. Developers, on the other hand, will not have to think about this blockchain part of the service as they will only have to provide a JSON schema with the data model and Vendia will provide them with a GraphQL API to work with this data.
“At the end of the day, our customers have real issues,” Wagner said. “They don’t have a blockchain problem – they’re trying to sell tickets, settle financial transactions, track supply chains. They have real challenges.
Once the team starts talking to a potential customer’s IT teams, the discussion quickly focuses on blockchains, and as Wagner noted, this often includes teaching them things like immutability and lineage tracing. But for Vendia, the focus is on selling a solution to its customers’ problems. “For most of our customers, their main problem is that they have partners and they have problems sharing data with control, but they don’t want to invest a lot in IT and infrastructure for that” , added Rao and also noted that in today’s job market, even large companies don’t have many IT people who can take on new projects like this.
“Next-generation blockchains like Vendia represent a powerful way to solve age-old supply chain problems,” said David Bettenhausen, CEO of Aerotrax Technologies. “When connecting partners across the aviation, aerospace and defense supply chain, trust in accurate and verifiable data is paramount. The ability to deliver this trust at scale – with best-in-class security and cost-effective real-time data sharing – has made Vendia a critical component of our technology stack. With Vendia, we were able to reinvent our business model to deliver a frictionless customer onboarding experience and dramatically reduced sales cycles.
The Vendia team tells me the company currently has around 100 employees and the plan is to use the new funding to double that number by the end of the year.