Factom, a blockchain technology startup specializing in data management and storage, has raised US$4.2 million in a Series A funding round led by Tim Draper of Draper Associates. Other participants in the round include Fenbushi Corporation from China, Plug and Play, BnkToTheFuture, Propertyinfo Corporation, Star Vista Capital, LLC, CashBUS, as well as angel investors Kevin Spiers and Darla Spiers, Hillary Ryan, Leon Fu, among others.
The new capital will be used to “aggressively grow the company … develop its core technology and suite of products,” said Peter Kirby, Factom’s CEO and co-founder.
“We started Factom to build a more honest and transparent world using a pretty simple approach: create software that makes it impossible to change the past and point that software at places where it solves valuable business problems,” Kirby said. “This funding accelerates our progress down that road.”
Based in Austin, Texas, Factom develops data management and storage solutions for businesses, governments and non-profit organizations that leverage blockchain technology to ensure that the integrity of stored data remains intact, while providing complete transparency.
Factom currently offers three products: Factom Apollo, a solution for businesses and governments for real-time auditing and compliance; Factom Iris, a digital identity platform for Internet-of-Things devices; and Factom Hera, a private and permissioned blockchain solution built custom for enterprise needs.
Commenting on the new funding round, Tim Draper, a notorious investor based in San Francisco who has previously invested in the likes of Hotmail and Skype, said that unlike centralized data systems, Factom’s use of blockchain technology to decentralize data could help avoid critical failures due to individual mistake and malicious hacking.
“Securing data is mission critical for governments, banks, car companies, credit card companies, retailers and any company concerned with hacking,” Draper said. “Factom lets people sleep easy knowing that their bank account won’t be broken into, their car won’t errantly go off the road, and their identity won’t be stolen.”
The funding comes a new months after Factom was granted a US$199,000 award by the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate to advance the security of digital identity for IoT devices.
Unveiled in June, the project, called Blockchain Software to Prove Integrity of Captured Data From Border Devices, sought to create an identity log that captured the identification of a device, who manufactured it, lists of available updates, known security issues and granted authorities while adding the dimension of time for added security.
It aimed at limiting would-be hackers’ abilities to corrupt that past records of a device, making it more difficult to spoof.