DrumG Technologies, a blockchain startup started by R3’s former head of global business development Tim Grant, has raised US$6.5 million in a Series A funding round from Ethereum development studio ConsenSys AG, the startup announced on Monday. ConsenSys was the sole investor in this funding round. ConsenSys founder and CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin will join the DrumG Technologies board of directors.
“We are excited to partner with DrumG Technologies as a strategic investor and as a part of our broad portfolio of activity in the enterprise distributed ledger space,” said Lubin. “The team’s proven experience in delivering enterprise solutions to regulated capital markets, combined with its deep knowledge of the blockchain technologies makes it a valuable part of the ConsenSys global financial services offering.”
DrumG Technologies is building “next generation” enterprise blockchain-based business networks and applications for the regulated global financial services industry. Initially, the startup will focus on building applications on Enterprise Ethereum and R3’s Corda Enterprise.
“We have seen tremendous evolution of enterprise blockchain platforms in this space over the last three years and the level of sophistication and preparedness within the financial services community has also increased. However, there is still work to do to get to functioning systems in production,” Grant, DrumG Technologies’ CEO, said.
“We believe in delivering solutions that generate true business value on a timeline measured in months rather than years, which requires a radically pragmatic focus on deployment, a deep understanding of financial markets from both a business and technology perspective, and hands-on experience of the strengths and limitations of different enterprise platforms.”
DrumG Technologies has begun work on two enterprise applications. The first is the Titanium Network, a decentralized, anonymous and cryptographically secured over-the-counter (OTC) consensus data solution for investment bank trading and valuation operations, which includes Credit Suisse as a network founding institution.
With the Titanium Network, DrumG aims to propose a faster, more capable and significantly cheaper option compared with the existing expensive, centralized and bilateral OTC data-sharing process.
“We are excited to work with the DrumG team and serve as a founding institution for the Titanium Network which will build the next generation OTC securities consensus pricing service,” said Emmanuel Aidoo, head of distributed ledger technology strategy at Credit Suisse. “We look forward to welcoming other financial institutions to the Titanium Network.”
The system is being developed on the Enterprise Ethereum platform. DrumG is preparing for a Q2 2019 live deployment.
The second solution is a post-trade reconciliation network for hedge funds, prime brokers, fund administrators and auditors, enabling a validated, auditable and permissioned view of transactions and holdings between market participants.
The solution is proposed to be built on R3’s Corda Enterprise platform with a view to deployment in late 2019. DrumG said it was working with significant industry players to form the network of founding institutions.