Fluree, a blockchain startup
based in North Carolina, has raised US$4.7 million in a seed funding round led
by 4490 Ventures with participation from Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed
Fund, reports
TechCrunch.
Fluree is a data management platform that combines blockchain
and graph database technologies to provide a novel way of storing and querying
data. The company’s technology has two components: FlureeDL, an immutable
distributed ledger which secures every update with blockchain cryptography in a
chronology of events, and FlureeDB, a graph database optimized to build
applications on top of FlureeDL.
“The real benefits [Fluree] provides is immense integrity
around the data, so you can prove it has never been tampered with, who put it
in there, etc., something you can’t do with current databases or other data
management technologies,” Brian Platz, CEO and co-founder of Fluree, said,
quoted by TechCrunch.
“It has the ability to make the data immensely collaborative
by allowing multiple parties to actually interact with it and improve security,
and it really allows you, especially with how we’ve organized our database, to
get better leverage out of the data.”
Fluree is a rival to blockchain platforms such as
Hyperledger Fabric, though there are considerable differences between the two
and they can also be complementary to one another, Platz told
SiliconANGLE in an interview last year.
When it comes to building an app that tokenizes something, “Hyperledger
is a great fit, but that app likely has a lot of other data besides just token
quantities and accounts,” Platz explained. “Today that is usually shoved into
some database and is effectively ‘off-chain,’ so FlureeDB, here, is a great
complement to Hyperledger as the entire solution can be secured by a
blockchain.”
Though Hyperledger can be used for storing records, Flubee
is a better fit for this purpose.
“FlureeDB is really a
decentralized, sophisticated data store. Supply chain applications certainly
rely on payments and transactions, but that is just a very small sliver of a
supply chain solution. FlureeDB also stores product descriptions, detailed
invoicing and more,” Platz said.
Fluree is available in two options: a free community edition,
and a licensed version with more enterprise-grade features and support
services. The company, which currently employs 17 people based in Winston
Salem, said it will use the capital injection to expand its team in the coming
year.
Fluree won
US$10,000 in a pitch competition at Capital Connects, a conference held last
year by the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce’s Launch Greensboro arm, and the
company’s technology has
been integrated into Benekiva, an insurtech platform focused on digitizing
the life insurance claims process.
By leveraging Fluree, Benekiva has been able to provide an
exact and immutable account of life insurance policies (and their
modifications) to its partners, policyholders, and intended beneficiaries.