Data sharing platform Vendia announced the closing of a $30 million Series B funding round led by NewView Capital, The round included Neotribe Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Aspenwood Ventures and BMW iVentures.
Founded by Dr. Tim Wagner, former Managing Director of Amazon Cloud Technologies (AWS Lambda), and Shruthi Rao, former head of Amazon's blockchain, Vendia is headquartered in San Francisco with a team of people from Amazon, Facebook, SpaceX, and more.
Vendia focuses on verticals such as financial services, travel and hospitality. The startup combines serverless and blockchain technology to allow companies to easily share better data and code across applications, platforms, and partners. Companies rely on Vendia for data integration, financial settlement, learning and training, transaction processing and more.
The concept of blockchain is often associated with overhyped cryptocurrencies, and Wagner noted that when discussing product positioning with users and customers, the topic of blockchain is rarely the first conversation, Wagner said: "From the customer's perspective, we talked more about sharing workflows, data, etc., and when customers started asking us how we worked, we used terms like distributed, ledger, etc., to describe the technology advantage we have right now."
Vendia wants to use blockchain as a secure foundation to facilitate sharing and data collaboration, providing a low-code way to handle data sharing patterns across multiple departments, companies, and the cloud.
Vendia Share is Vendia's first product, initially for enterprises to Share real-time data with partner clouds. Vendia has built-in source tracking and tamper-proof features to ensure that enterprises, as users, can control access. New customers for Vendia include BMW, Aerotrax and Slalom. Vendia says that Vendia Share is set up to be a decentralized data application platform that any developer can build, with separate pay-as-you-go pricing developed in the new version of functionality to make it accessible to more developers and users across the cloud.