Secure Data Management Leader Fluree Raises $6.5 Million

By Annie Baker ● Oct 5, 2020
  • Fluree — a market leader in secure data management — announced it has closed a seed round of $6.5 million in venture capital led by 4490 Ventures

Fluree — a market leader in secure data management — announced it has closed a seed round of $6.5 million in venture capital led by 4490 Ventures. Additional investors in this round include Rise of the Rest, Good Growth Capital, Engage Ventures, and former Venrock Managing Partner Ray Rothrock. Launched in 2016 by Brian Platz and Flip Filipowski, Fluree is a Public Benefit Corporation headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

This round of funding will be used to accelerate product development efforts for building applications that utilize W3C verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers (DID). And the company has experienced substantial growth since the beginning of 2020, adding marquee customers such as the United States Air Force and Wake Forest Health.

While Web 2.0 continues to sag under the weight of excessive integrations and costly and insecure data lakes, the Fluree platform heralds a new era of secure, trustworthy data management. Fluree is the pluggable stack that developers need to build enterprise-grade Web 3.0 applications with cryptographically-secure data integrity. And leading organizations in sectors including education, supply chain and healthcare are employing the platform to build secure blockchain applications that fix some of the Internet’s biggest problems.

This recently funding round will drive new innovation around a much-needed ecosystem of verifiable credentials and DIDs. And Fluree is available on all leading cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

KEY QUOTES:

“We couldn’t ask for a better group of investors to bolster our platform during a time of rapid blockchain innovation. As data-centric security, verifiable credentials and secure data sharing become the cornerstones of Web 3.0, Fluree and our trusted investors are becoming key players in the internet of tomorrow.”

— Fluree Co-CEO Brian Platz

“The power of data-centricity is evident in the market dominance and profitability of data-centric companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Fluree’s mission is to enable enterprises to evolve from their current state of being application-centric to becoming data-centric. Becoming data-centric using current data management products is too difficult and expensive for 99% of the world’s enterprises. Not only does Fluree take out massive cost elements of becoming data-centric, it enables a whole suite of new capabilities that not even the largest companies can build today without storing their data in a platform such as Fluree’s.”

— Dan Malven, managing director of 4490 Ventures

“The biggest organizations in the world are universally experiencing major challenges with storing, securing, and sharing the massive amounts of data generated every day in the enterprise. The need to break down data silos and become a data-centric organization is becoming increasingly urgent, and we believe that Fluree’s approach to make data self-securing and portable provides a powerful platform to facilitate this transformation. We are pleased to expand on our partnership and support the growth of the Fluree team.”

— Thiago Olsen, managing director at Engage

“With the advent of Web 3.0 machine-to-machine real-time AI applications, cybersecurity approaches need to move away from only allowing stage-gate access to data to allowing multi-party real-time access to data while still ensuring its integrity, and Fluree’s blockchain-based data platform does just that. Fluree represents a groundbreaking innovation that will power the internet applications of tomorrow.”

— Ray Rothrock, former Managing Partner of Venrock and long-time cybersecurity investor — who has led early-stage investments in other groundbreaking IT security companies like Check Point Software, Cloudflare, and Shape Security