- Fluree, Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based data-first technology stack company, announced recently that it raised $4.73 million in seed funding
- This round of funding was led by 4490 Ventures
Fluree, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based data-first technology stack company, announced recently that it raised $4.73 million in seed funding led by 4490 Ventures. And Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund also participated in this round.
Launched in 2016 by Andrew ‘Flip’ Filipowski and Brian Platz, Fluree is considered a Public Benefit Corporation and the seed funding capital is going to accelerate the adoption of its existing product through market awareness and increasing R&D ahead of its open source release later this year.
“Data is at the center of the new economy, yet it is managed by the same database approach we’ve had for 40 years,” said Platz in a statement. “We need to move beyond the application-centric mindset that has given rise to data silos and API bloat while increasing costs and obstacles to adopting new tech-like AI. A data-centric approach simultaneously saves money, promotes secure enterprise collaboration and provides additional leverage for information across systems.”
Fluree has a diverse customer base including Fortune 500 companies and government agencies that utilizes the service for a better enterprise database and unique benefits involving emerging architectures and services that rely heavily on trusted and shared data. These technologies include artificial intelligence, machine learning, microservices, consortium blockchain networks, and the semantic web.
“Today’s data needs to be leveraged and transacted by participants both inside and outside the enterprise,” added Filipowski. “Fluree stores all data on a blockchain ledger that can be run internally like a traditional data store, or selectively operated in a data network across parties governed by Fluree SmartFunction™ rules. Decentralized data ownership like this has never before been possible, and we are excited to witness an entirely new class of applications that emerge from no longer having to blindly trust other parties with critical data.”
“Fluree is set to revolutionize the way we manage and share data,” explained 4490 Ventures managing director Dan Malven. “The world is evolving from static apps to platforms to ecosystems, and technology tools have not kept pace. Innovators have to force fit data management tools originally designed to build static apps, slowing down the evolution to data-driven ecosystems. Fluree has in place the mission, technology and road map necessary to serve a wide variety of industries as they transform through the next evolution of data management to a much more interconnected world.”
A free version of Fluree can be downloaded or you can sign up for a freemium hosted on-demand version. Plus there is a licensed version for production deployments.
Through Fluree, data can defend itself and allow direct data connections to external parties where data dynamically enforces permissions using Fluree SmartFunctions. Rather than building expensive APIs, developers are able to safely expose rich and permissioned query interfaces to the data source including GraphQL, SPARQL, and Fluree’s JSON-based FlureeQL.
“We are excited to back this team of seasoned technologists and startup execs who are making a bold bet on the future of data architecture,” noted Rise of the Rest Seed Fund partner Anna Mason. “With Fluree, they are continuing to put Winston-Salem on the map as a startup hub of the future.”
The Fluree data management stack includes three main elements including Fluree Ledger Server (handles updates in a blockchain-backed ledger of W3C RDF data and optionally participates in a decentralized data network), Fluree Edge Server (optionally placed anywhere in the world and is linearly scalable), and the Fluree Library (an optional full in-memory, time-traveling semantic graph database that can be embedded in code with JavaScript).
