Ushering in the future of enterprise data sharing with Vendia

In 2021, Moneyweek declared the 2020s the “decade of the DAO”, the first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BITO, and Jimmy Fallon paid more than $200,000 for an NFT of an Bored Ape avatar with a captain's hat. Despite recent volatility, the NFT market is still on track to reach $15 billion to $20 billion in 2022. Blockchain is disrupting the world as we know it. 

There is great promise in the technology that makes digital assets like NFTs immutable, secure, and seamlessly transferable. In practice, blockchain can be applied to any kind of data—take, for example, the vast amounts of data generated by enterprises. Today, much of this data is siloed, with more than 80% of the average business’ data living in third-party systems. This is more than just an inconvenience for enterprises: it impedes multi-party collaboration and results in lost revenue and inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and gaps in data. It also makes it more difficult to generate intelligent business decisions.

The conundrum of how to best manage, share, and leverage this data has plagued businesses. Historically, enterprise data has been managed via ERP solutions, rigid APIs, and custom integrations. But these solutions are difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain. Blockchain technology showed potential for sophisticated enterprise data management, however, early applications failed due to inherent architectural issues with scalability, performance, and deployment. 

Enter Vendia: a modern solution to realize the promise of enterprise blockchain, co-founded by the inventor of the serverless movement.

A new era with Vendia

At NewView Capital (NVC), we’re excited to announce that we are leading a $30M Series B round for Vendia, a next-generation blockchain that enables businesses to securely share data in real-time with anyone, anywhere, at scale. Vendia empowers enterprise data sharing across applications, clouds, geographies, tech stacks, and companies with unprecedented ease, speed, and affordability. A proof of concept can be built in days. Full deployment takes weeks, not months as with existing blockchain solutions. All with almost no operational overhead. Vendia’s platform also uniquely enables businesses to maintain full control over their data, with completely immutable tracking of data additions and updates, and the power to instantly change global access permissions. We believe that Vendia has the potential to define a new standard for enterprise data sharing. 

The next generation: Severless + blockchain

At NVC, we are particularly invested in the challenge of data management, and have committed time and capital to building the next generation of data infrastructure and API-first companies. Our data infrastructure investments include Reltio (master data management), Aerospike (real-time data platform), and DataStax (cloud data platform powering Apache Cassandra and Pulsar). We also have API-first portfolio companies, including MuleSoft (API integration platform), Plaid (API for financial data and apps), Modern Treasury (API for money movement), and Veryfi (OCR API for unstructured data extraction).

Having partnered with great founders and CEOs from these companies, we believe that the true promise of Vendia begins with the brilliant team at its helm. Co-founders Tim Wagner (CEO) and Shruthi Rao (CBO) are deeply respected by their peers and customers alike, with extensive experience in blockchain, serverless architecture, and cloud infrastructure. Tim famously invented AWS Lambda, earning him the moniker “father of serverless.” Following his time at AWS, Tim joined Coinbase as the VP of Engineering, giving him deeper insight into the potential—and limitations—of blockchain technology. His technical expertise is paralleled by the business prowess of Shruthi, who led business development for blockchain and the serverless offering at AWS, bringing the technology to international, startup, and SMB segments. 

Together, Tim and Shruthi have built a platform that combines the flexible architecture of serverless with the distributed power of blockchain. In many ways, these two technologies are a perfectly symbiotic pairing. Where traditional blockchain technology falters—performance, scalability, and ease of deployment—serverless excels. And blockchain’s greatest value— decentralized, persistent, trustworthy data—serverless has historically lacked. By integrating the two, Vendia’s next-generation blockchain meets the challenge of enterprise data management in a profound new way. Vendia enables businesses to share data across clouds with anyone, anywhere, instantly, while retaining full control. 

By design, Vendia is: 

• Built for scale. Vendia’s 100% serverless architecture allows for an unlimited amount of computing power, memory, storage, and networking capacity. 
• Trustworthy. With next-generation blockchain, enterprises can be confident in data accuracy, provenance, traceability, and safety. 
• Instant. Unlimited computing power and speed empowers businesses to access, delete, or update data in real time.
• Simple to deploy, adopt, and maintain. Vendia’s serverless architecture eliminates the need for API creation and infrastructure design, provisioning, and management. This dramatically accelerates the development process. Full deployment takes weeks, compared to months with competitors. This architecture also enables businesses to add new use cases in weeks and new partners in minutes, making data almost immediately accessible across multiple parties.
• Affordable. Vendia is a turnkey solution, requiring almost no operational overhead to implement and maintain. This ease of deployment and maintenance translates to a 5 to 10x reduction in cost compared to competitive solutions. 

Real-time data with real impact

Since its founding in early 2020, Vendia has grown rapidly, attracting global enterprise customers such as Aerotrax, ARC, Best Friends Animal Society, BMW, Nestle Purina, Resolution Life, United Foods, and more. Already, there are many use cases for Vendia’s next-generation blockchain—from airline ticketing to powering financial services to optimizing supply chains.

The latter has proved particularly critical in today’s climate. With a global pandemic and war wreaking havoc on supply chain operations, companies are in dire need of solutions to optimize performance. Vendia makes it easier to connect and coordinate multiple partners across a supply chain, providing instant insight into operations and an opportunity to stay one step ahead of disruptions. 

BMW was one of the first companies to deploy Vendia’s technology across its global supply chain operations. With Vendia, BMW can now share data with every partner in their supply chain in real time. The next-generation blockchain creates one single, shared source of truth to prevent data inconsistencies, gaps, and errors across partners. Among other benefits for BMW, this helps ensure parts quality—a critical concern when producing luxury vehicles. If damage occurs to a vehicle component, BMW can quickly and accurately identify the source in the supply chain, correctly assign costs, and proactively prevent future issues, thus improving the end-to-end build process.

This remarkable range across industries and use cases speaks to the opportunity ahead for Vendia. In the past year, Vendia has experienced exponential growth in annual recurring revenue and a 550% increase in new customers. With this latest round of funding, Vendia will focus on building their team, advancing their GTM engine, and scaling partnerships, certifications, and new areas of compliance. At NVC, we believe this is just the beginning of an exciting journey for Vendia, one which we are thrilled to play a small part in. 

To learn more about Vendia and their innovations in next-generation blockchain technology, visit vendia.net.

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