Kleiner Perkins Has $25.5M Funding Led By Blockchain Capital

Perkins and Bison Trails

Here comes the tech giant with a $ 25.5 million Series A funding round for the counterpart of Bison Trails, Kleiner Perkins as a provider of blockchain protocols therefore led by Blockchain Capital developing the firm’s infrastructure services. Whereas the other participants had included Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys, A Capital, Collaborative Fund, and Sound Ventures as the new investors. Finally, Galaxy Digital and Initialised were early backers joining the latest round after participating in a $ 5.25 million seed round. Thereafter as observed, coming to be one of the 21 founding members of Facebook’s Libra Association, Bison Trails boosted its somewhat flagging reputation as the global infrastructure service provider after high profile players similar to PayPal pulled out.

Making Bison Trails the only blockchain infrastructure firm in the Libra project, the New York-based start-up helps customers deploy the participation nodes on any of the blockchains and has to develop their supporting technologies such as security serving more than 20 protocol projects. According to Kleiner Perkins investing partner, Monica Desai, the realization dawns upon Bison Trails early that node infrastructure is becoming a bottleneck to the adoption of blockchain as it is why they created a decentralized user-friendly solution. 

As commented by Joe Lallouz the CEO of Bison Trails, as they started building the company they wanted more transparency and ease to entrepreneurs that are bold enough to build in a decentralized ecosystem with investors wise enough to back a nascent market as the enterprises courageous enough to commit to a technological inevitability like the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. He further notes that they have become the easiest way to thereby run infrastructure on multiple blockchains helping the world’s leading protocols with companies and builders launching and managing the secure and highly available and geographically distributed nodes that are on blockchain networks.

Walmart And The Blockchain To Improve Food Safety

As noticed working with IBM on a food safety blockchain solution Walmart has thereby announced its requirements that all suppliers of leafy green vegetables for Sam’s and Walmart upload their data to the blockchain. While manual processes bog down most of the supply chains it makes it a difficult and time-consuming process to track down an issue as the one like the E.coli romaine Lettuce problem rearing its head. Thereafter on placing a supply chain on the blockchain it is sure to make the process more traceable, transparent and fully digital with each node on the blockchain representing an entity handling the food on the way to the store and making it much easier and faster to see if there is one of the affected farms selling infected supply to a particular location with much needed greater precision. 

Working with IBM for over a year, Walmart focuses on using the blockchain to digitize the food supply chain process whereas the supply chain comes to be one of the premier business use cases for the blockchain. In this case, Walmart comes to be using IBM Food Trust Solution specifically developed for the use case. As explained by Bridget van Kralingen, IBM’s senior VP for Global Industries, Platforms, and Blockchain they built the IBM Food Trust Solution using the IBM Blockchain Platform as a tool or capability as the IBM has built helping companies build, govern and run blockchain networks as they are built using Hyperledger Fabric running on IBM Cloud. 

The situation was that it typically took approximately 7 days to trace the source of the food before moving the process to the blockchain as now with the blockchain it has been reduced to 2.2 seconds substantially reducing the likelihood that infected food reaches the consumer.

Regarding the issues requiring the suppliers to put their information on the blockchain is, therefore, to understand that there comes a range of approaches from paper to Excel spreadsheets to sophisticated ERP systems uploading data to the blockchain. Thereafter in the context one Walmart spokesperson Molly Blakeman says that this is something they have worked hard on with IBM to account for where suppliers don’t have to be the blockchain experts by any means as they simply have to know how to upload the data to the blockchain application. 

As she says IBM is offering an onboarding system where it orients users with the service easily and think about it when you get a new iPhone the instructions are easy to understand that you’re quickly up and running. Similarly, it is the aim here to essentially let suppliers with a need for smart devices and the internet to participate. The company has after working with it for a year that things are ready for broader implementation with the goal being to make sure that the food sold at Walmart is safe for consumption and in case of any problem, making auditing the supply chain a trivial activity. 

Concluding The Discussion Taking Into Account A Few More Details

Finally, according to Frank Yiannas, the vice president of food safety for Walmart in a statement said that the customers deserve a more transparent supply chain as they felt one-step -up and thereby the one-step-back model for the traceability of the food which was outdated for the 21st century and the smart, technology-supported move will greatly benefit the customers transforming the food system benefitting all stakeholders. Additionally, the blockchain requirement as the company is also requiring comes to be that the suppliers adhere to one of the Global Food Safety Initiative internationally recognized as food safety standards.