Yesterday blockchain data startup Vendia announced it raised a $30 million Series B led by NewView Capital, including investment from BMW iVentures, amongst several others. BMW also participated in the startup’s Series A round last year, with $50 million raised since its founding in March 2020.
Vendia’s mission is to enable real-time data sharing across corporate data silos in a permissioned manner. Co-founded by Tim Wagner, former Conbase VP of Engineering and ex-general manager of Amazon’s serverless offering, AWS Lambda, Vendia takes a different approach to enterprise blockchain applications by providing a serverless blockchain platform. It views the server nodes required by other enterprise blockchains such as Corda, Fabric and Quorum as a performance limitation. Just as important, managing the blockchain server and tech stack is considered by many as a major hurdle to adoption.
“Companies across all industries are struggling to manage and share business-critical data in a secure and scalable way that also allows for a single, shared platform across partners,” said Ben Fu, Partner at NewView Capital. “The market need for next-gen blockchain solutions like Vendia is undeniable.”
The startup says that in the last year, around half of its customers moved to Vendia after a failed blockchain project. Its recurring revenue is up 16 times, and customer numbers have grown more than five fold.
Vendia offers the same single source of truth concept as other blockchains, but at the same time provides scalability because it’s serverless and has a GraphQL database structure. It also lets developers use a variety of programming languages for smart contracts. While it started by focusing on AWS it now supports Azure with Google Cloud coming.
“Vendia offers a unique platform solution for businesses that depend on a multitude of partners, providing them with the ability to onboard partners swiftly, and enabling them to share data with full control and confidence that such data would not be overwritten or manipulated,” said Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures.
Other investors in the round included Neythri Futures Fund, Operator Partners, Lux Capital, Neotribe Ventures, Aspenwood Ventures, Sorenson Capital, and Canvas Ventures,
