Adding $2 million to its largest fundraise late last year, fast-growing Winston-Salem blockchain company Fluree closed a Series A fundraise of $10 million.
TBJ reported in December that the company, which develops secure database management platforms in Web3, had raised $8 million in equity. The total of $10 million represents the largest amount the company has raised since it was founded in 2016.
The funding round was led by SineWave Ventures.
Ventures, Wave Financial – as well as existing Fluree investors Good Growth Capital and Rise of the Rest – contributed to the Series A.
With rapid growth in 2022, Fluree landed on TBJ’s Startup to Watch list for 2023.
GO DEEPER: Fluree plans 'significant product launch' this year
In September, Fluree made its first-ever acquisition with ZettaLabs, a New Jersey company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to prepare raw data for analytics. CEO Brian Platz told TBJ at the time that Fluree will be able to tap into a new market with the new product, Fluree Sense, that the merger created.
Earlier in the year, Fluree also began a partnership with Malaysian supply chain company Sinisana Technologies for an app that traces halal food from its origin to grocery stores.
In January 2023, the company said it had 50 employees.
Fluree said that it would use the Series A capital to expand its Web3 data platforms and enterprise offerings, with a focus on verifiable credentials, enterprise blockchain and decentralized-data management. The $10 million will also allow Fluree to assist enterprise organizations transform data from legacy infrastructure to collaborative modern platforms.
“Our data-management vision always has been to rebuild data architecture for the modern enterprise,” Platz said. “As we move from ‘data as a byproduct’ in applications to ‘data being the product,’ Fluree will provide best-in-class data infrastructure to service this shift. We believe that data should be secure, interoperable, trusted, semantically linked and accessible.”
To date, the company has raised approximately $16.5 million. It raised $6.5 million in a seed round in 2019 that was led by 4490 Ventures.
“We understand the current data and analytics landscape, and Fluree is at the vanguard,” said Vivek Ladsariya, general partner at SineWave Ventures. “SineWave focuses on accelerating digital transformation and understanding that the status-quo, distributed-data landscape is rife with barriers to entry and value. We are excited to join forces with Fluree and build technology that moves data and analytics into a more secure, efficient and democratized market.”
Fluree’s customer base includes commercial partners such as enterprise businesses and Web3 startups Pravica, Fabric and Logosphere. The Winston-Salem company has also worked with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Education.
With open-source software, Fluree said that it has had more than 100,000 downloads of its software products.
“The need in the marketplace for companies to access and share data securely, both inside and outside its four walls, is ever increasing,” said Eliud Polanco, who was named Fluree’s president after the merger with ZettaLabs. “This is driving demand for more sophisticated data governance and control capabilities. Fluree stands ready to provide the necessary tools to service these emerging demands.”
