Decentralized database platform Fluree has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by 4490 Ventures, with additional participation from Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. The round, the largest tech infrastructure seed funding ever in North Carolina, will be leveraged to accelerate enterprise client acquisition, enhance the core product, and hire.
Up to this point, the startup had been self-funded.
“[In the past year] we have focused in our core data management technology, launched a production release, and have production clients now utilizing Fluree. We’ve won numerous awards and are being recognized as the main solution allowing enterprises to easily and quickly build distributed ledger backed apps,” co-CEO Brian Platz tells Hypepotamus.
By using a data-first approach, Fluree helps enterprises efficiently build and scale applications without running into a technical wall or high transaction costs.
“A data-centric approach simultaneously saves money, promotes secure enterprise collaboration and provides additional leverage for information across systems,” said Platz.
The FlureeDB platform offers an open-source, scalable enterprise solution that eliminates the need for multiple blockchains across different applications. It allows developers to create more powerful applications, address any data management issues and provides a Time Travel feature to pull instant historical queries.
“We feel that we have created an environment in which the technology is capable of very high volume transactions and high volume of data,” co-CEO Flip Filipowski told Hypepotamus last year. “I think that this combination in today’s world does not exist and is unbeatable in terms of the way you can address the data.”
Filipowski and Platz founded Fluree as a Public Benefit Corporation in 2016. Their combined experience of more than 20 years in technology led them to start from bottom up — technology and problem before product.
The technology works with centralized and decentralized applications, artificial intelligence, and microservice architectures.
Fluree has a global customer base of over 400 organizations, with several Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and technology startups using their paid version. The startup also offers a free community version.
“Fluree is set to revolutionize the way we manage and share data,” said Dan Malven, managing director at 4490 Ventures. “The world is evolving from static apps to platforms to ecosystems, and technology tools have not kept pace… 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.”
Fluree currently has 17 employees in Winston-Salem, NC, and will be expanding to over 50 employees following this round.
