Fluree
Year founded: 2016
No. of employees: 50
Top executives: Brian Platz, CEO and co-founder
Address: 486 Patterson Ave., Suite 221, Winston-Salem 27101
Phone: 336-283-7288
Website: https://flur.ee/
Twitter: @FlureePBC
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fluree-pbc/
It’s hard to ignore the obvious wordplay when describing the year that Fluree has had.
To put it plainly, the Winston-Salem blockchain technology company has experienced a flurry of activity in 2022 – and it’s looking like 2023 will be no different.
Fluree, co-founded in 2016 by CEO Brian Platz and Executive Chairman Flip Filipowski, is working to pioneer artificial-intelligence-driven and technology-forward database management platforms in Web3. Fluree’s platforms secure data using blockchain technology.
Platz told TBJ in October that a merger is an indicator of a company’s trajectory, so it should be no surprise that one of the biggest moves that Fluree made in 2022 was the September acquisition of New Jersey company ZettaLabs, which uses AI and machine learning to prepare raw data for analytics.
The acquisition resulted in a new product, Fluree Sense, that allows Fluree to tap into a new market to serve enterprises needing data-centric architecture and legacy data infrastructure modernization. A data pipeline, Fluree Sense normalizes, cleanses and harmonizes data from different sources in a streamlined fashion. In addition, ZettaLab’s employees became part of Fluree, with the New Jersey company’s co-founder and CEO Eliud Polcano becoming president of Fluree.
In December, Fluree raised its largest amount since its founding – over $8 million in equity, according to a Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The total offering amount was just over $12 million, leaving approximately $3.8 million left to be sold.
Even with all these milestones, Platz said that the most work Fluree did this year was towards verifiable credentials, particularly in education.
The company completed its contracts with the Department of Education from 2021, and Platz said Fluree is now working with several education institutions, either in direct partnership or in partnership with the state government, on student credentials such as digital degrees or transcripts.
Platz believes this arena of verifiable credentials has the potential to affect a number of industries from financial services to health care.
“The consumer holds complete power over who gets access to [their data] and how,” he said. “This is all leading into a very highly regulated area – or will be a regulated area – around what companies or organizations can do with consumer data without consent. This is a technology that puts the consumer – the end user – in direct control. They basically own the data and determine how it’s used.”
This year, Fluree was also named one of the top five data management startups advancing Web3 by StartUs Insights and one of the ‘coolest database system companies’ in 2022 by CRN.
In 2023, Platz said that Fluree will have a “significant product launch” related to housing provable data in a cloud or elsewhere. He expects that this will take place towards the end of the first quarter.
“We’ve got a pipeline of new products and we’re taking our existing products and continuing to gain traction and see areas that have tremendous opportunity,” he said.
Q&A with Brian Platz
How do you foresee emerging from the work Fluree is doing with verifiable credentials?
This is one of the really exciting things that we’re going to see over the next couple of years. We’ve made tremendous progress in 2022 towards this vision, this idea of portable, provable digital credentials. Consumers will have wallets but instead of holding credit cards, they’re going to hold their health records, their university degree, their driver’s license, their passport. They’re going to hold their last pay stub so they can prove to a mortgage company how much money they make without the mortgage company needing to call their employer. This is the world of these verifiable credentials, which is just emerging, and we’re playing a central role in that. That’s where we spent a lot of time in 2022 with different, very high-profile initiatives, some of which we can’t talk about quite yet. We’ll be able to talk a lot more about this in 2023.
This is going to impact all areas of our daily lives. Fluree is playing a foundational role in the early stages of this.
Do you plan to keep Fluree’s headquarters in Winston-Salem?
That’s something that we’re very focused on doing. We were reluctantly talked out of doing it in the last company Flip [Filipowski] and I started; we ended up moving our headquarters from Winston-Salem to Chicago based on external pressures. I think this community now has the pieces in place that allow us to more easily defend why this is important for us to be an important place for us to be and to be headquartered. We not only have the motivation [to stay] but the community has handed us better tools to be able to justify that.
How are you handling Fluree’s tremendous growth?
I’ve been starting software companies for getting close to 30 years. This isn’t my first rodeo. It’s the only thing I’ve known, and I’m used to doing it. It’s not an unfamiliar circumstance for me but, yeah, it’s difficult. Growing and maintaining the good things about the company when you were small as it grows [is] one of the challenges that will always be there for us as we continue to have successes.
