Know All The Details As Vendia Raises $5.1M For Its Multi-cloud Serverless Platform

The Launch Of Vendia

It is worth paying attention to the start-up co-founded by the inventor of AWS Lambda Tim Wagner and the former head of blockchain at AWS Shruthi Rao called Vendia as they come with a new venture therefore seen to be including what is the best of the serverless and blockchain helping build what is accounted as a truly multi-cloud serverless platform for better data and code sharing. 

Moving on it was the Vendia team announcing that raising a $5.1 million seed funding round, it was led by Neotribe’s Swaroop KittuKolluri where the Correlation Ventures, the WestWave Capital, the HWVP, the Firebolt Ventures, the Floodgate as well as the Future\Perfect Ventures are all seen to be participating in the oversubscribed round. 

It isn’t exactly surprising to see Wagner at the helm of the blockchain centric start-up after building Lambda at AWS and spending some time as the VP of engineering at Coinbase as he left about a year ago to build Vendia. 

As he explains one-day Coinbase approached him and said maybe they could do for the financial system what they have been doing over there for the cloud system as he got interested. After a few conversations, he ended up going to Coinbase to spent little over a year as the VP of engineering thereafter helping them set the stage for a few of the platform work and tripling the size of the team. Further on Coinbase was one of the few companies where the distributed ledgers are mission-critical to the business yet Coinbase had a hard time scaling the Ethereum fleet for example as there was no cloud-based service available to help it do so. 

Moving on he said that the thing that came to him as he was working there was why don’t they bring these two things together? As there come all the things that they have learned over the last 10 years thereby building out the public cloud and learning how to do it at scale, nobody is thinking about how would they build a distributed ledger or blockchain as if it was a cloud service. 

The Partnership Bearing The Fruit

Joining with Rao was Wagner, where she had spent a lot of her time in the role at AWS talking to those blockchain customers as she noticed one thing which was making a lot of sense using blockchain to establish trust in the public setting which is not an issue for enterprise. 

She further notes that since the 500th customer, everything started making sense as the customers made quite a bit of investment in the IoT and edge devices gathering massive amounts of data making investments on the other side with AI and ML and analytics. Following this, they said as there is a lot of data and they wanted to push all of this data through these intelligent systems they needed a mechanism to get this data. Whereas the majority of the data was often coming from third-party services and at the same time most of the blockchain proof of concepts were never moving into any real production usage as it is often far too complex as it is especially enterprises that are wanting to connect the systems to those of their partners. 

Going forward she explains that they were asking the partners to spin up Kubernetes clusters installing blockchain nodes and why is it so? The answer is for blockchain to bring trust into the system ensuring trust as they have the data and to own the data, they need their node solving fundamentally the wrong problem. 

Thereby being the first product brought to market by Vendia is Vendia Share which is a way for businesses sharing data with partners in real-time without giving up control over that data, and as noted by Wagner, these businesses often share the large data sets but they also want to ensure that they control the access to that data whereas for the users Vendia comes to be essentially a virtual data lake with provenance tracking and tamper-proofing built-in. 

Mostly raising the round after the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the US, the company is already working with a couple of design partners in multiple industries to test out the ideas and plans using the new funding to expand the engineering team building out the tools. 

Finally, Why Is Neotribe Investing In The Venture?

According to Neotribe's founder and managing director Kolluri, at Neotribe Ventures they have invested in breakthrough technologies stretching the imagination and partnering with companies having category creation potential built upon a deep-tech platform with blockchain. He further continues that as they heard the Vendia story, it became a no brainer for them were the size of the market for multiparty, multi-cloud data as well as code aggregation coming enormous and only grows larger as companies capture even the very last bit of data. Here it was found that Vendia’s serverless based technology has offers benefiting similarly to the ease of experimentation with no operational heavy lifting and a pay-as-you-go pricing model making it both very consumable and highly disruptive. With the backgrounds of both Tim and Shruthi, they know they have found the ideal Founder fit to solve the problem as they are excited to be the lead investors and a part of the journey.