Fluree Closes Seed Funding Round to Power Secure Data Management in the Web 3.0 Era

• Rapid growth startup closes $6.5 million seed round led by 4490 Ventures, with participation by Rise of the Rest, Good Growth Capital, Engage Ventures and former Venrock Managing Partner Ray Rothrock.

• Closing of the seed round coincides with commencement of Phase II of the U.S. Air Force’s project to use Fluree’s Web 3.0 data management platform to create a secure, distributed data sharing system for the U.S. Department of Defense’s global operations.

• Fluree’s semantic graph data platform is at the cutting edge of innovation in verifiable credentials, data-centric security and next-generation enterprise master data management. As industries move towards data-driven B2B ecosystems, Fluree’s technology liberates data from organizational silos to empower collaborative insights and support a faster pace of innovation.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#Application—Fluree, a market leader in secure data management, today announced the official close of its seed round of $6.5 million in venture capital funding, led by 4490 Ventures. Additional investors in the round include Rise of the Rest, Good Growth Capital, Engage Ventures and former Venrock Managing Partner Ray Rothrock.

The latest round of funding will be used to accelerate product development efforts for building applications that utilize W3C verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers (DID). 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.

“We couldn’t ask for a better group of investors to bolster our platform during a time of rapid blockchain innovation,” said Fluree Co-CEO Brian Platz. “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.”

The Web 3.0 Data Management Platform

As 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.

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. The recent funding round in particular will drive new innovation around a much-needed ecosystem of verifiable credentials and DIDs. Fluree is available on all leading cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Investor Perspectives on Fluree Seed Funding Round

“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,” said Dan Malven, managing director of 4490 Ventures. “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.”

“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,” said Thiago Olsen, managing director at Engage. “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.”

“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,” said Ray Rothrock, former Managing Partner of Venrock and long-time cybersecurity investor who has led early-stage investments in other groundbreaking IT security companies such as Check Point Software (NASDAQ: CHKP, market cap $16B), Cloudflare (NYSE: NET, market cap $11B) and Shape Security (acquired by F5 Networks for $1B).

About Fluree, PBC

Founded in 2016 by Brian Platz and Flip Filipowski, Fluree PBC is a Public Benefit Corporation headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Fluree is an enterprise data management platform that guarantees data integrity, facilitates secure data sharing, and powers data-driven insights. The Fluree platform organizes blockchain-secured data in a scalable semantic graph database – establishing a foundational layer of trusted data for connected and intelligent data ecosystems. For more information, follow Fluree on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit flur.ee.

About 4490 Ventures

4490 Ventures invests in Connected Software companies. We are a team of investors, founders and operators with more than 100 years of combined experience who bring capital and a network of resources to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of tech companies. We are high conviction, high concentration early-stage investors focused on companies outside of Silicon Valley. For more information, visit 4490Ventures.com, or follow us on LinkedIn.

Contacts

Treble
Ethan Parker

fluree@treblepr.com