Vendia, a blockchain-based platform that makes it easier for businesses to share their code and data with partners across applications, platforms and clouds, today announced 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: the inventor of AWS Lambda, Tim Wagner, and the former head of blockchain at AWS, Shruthi Rao. Since the launch of Vendia, the company has added new customers such as BMW, Aerotrax and Slalom, who use it to have a single source of truth for sharing multi-cloud data with some of their partners. As Wagner noted, the company’s main focus so far has been in financial services, travel and hospitality, but with the new funding, it will likely expand into new verticals as well. Wagner also noted that the company recently launched a new line of products around CRM data sharing and as the company sees a lot of traction around its file sharing capabilities, it is investing in that as well.
Currently, Vendia supports AWS and the team recently launched Azure support as well. Support for the Google Cloud Platform is on the roadmap, alongside the company’s ongoing work to connect its service 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 an immutable serverless ledger to its users. to ensure data accuracy and origin and traceability. Developers, meanwhile, don’t have to think about this blockchain portion of the service, as they just need to provide a JSON schema with the data model and Vendia will provide them with a GraphQL API to work with this data.
Image Credits: Vendia
“Ultimately, our customers have real problems,” 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.”
However, once the team starts talking to a potential client’s IT teams, the discussion quickly turns to blockchains, and as Wagner noted, that often includes learning things like immutability and lineage tracing. But for Vendia, the focus is strongly on selling a solution to its customers’ problems. “For most of our customers, their core problem is that they have partners and have trouble sharing data with control, but they don’t want to invest a lot in IT and infrastructure for it,” Rao added, also noting that in In today’s job market, even large companies don’t have many IT people who can take on new projects like this.
Image Credits: Vendia
“Next-gen blockchains like Vendia represent a powerful way to solve age-old supply chain challenges,” said David Bettenhausen, CEO of Aerotrax Technologies. “When connecting partners in the aerospace, and defense chain, trust in accurate and verifiable data is paramount. The ability to deliver this trust at scale – with top-notch security and real-time data exchange in a cost-effective manner – has made Vendia a critical part of our technology stack. With Vendia, we have been able to reinvent our business model to enable a smooth onboarding experience for customers and significantly shorten sales cycles.”
The Vendia team tells me that the company currently has about 100 employees and plans to use the new funding to double that by the end of the year.
