Blockchain-backed graph database Fluree gets $10 million

North Carolina-based Fluree, a startup that provides Web3 data management tools, including a blockchain-backed semantic graph database, announced today that it has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round.

The investment comes as businesses look to blockchain technology for decentralized management of their data assets – with increased trust, transparency, security and traceability. Fluree said it will use the capital to continue building its “data-centric infrastructure” and help businesses upgrade their legacy infrastructure to collaborative modern computing platforms.

The company already works with several private and public organizations, including the US Department of Defense and the Department of Education.

How does Fluree help?

Launched in 2018, Fluree’s flagship product, Fluree Core, is an open source graph database that combines permissioned blockchain technology, semantic web standards, and data-centric security policy controls to help developers store and manage data in a decentralized and trusted format.

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The technology combines transactions into immutable time-stamped “blocks” and locks each block via asymmetric cryptography – making the data completely tamper-proof. Digital signatures are used for complete proof and visibility in the data lifecycle.

Once the data is blockchain secured, it is organized into the scalable database – establishing a layer of trusted data for connected and secure data ecosystems. The entire system guarantees data integrity, facilitates secure sharing and provides data-driven insights, the company notes.

“While most databases live as static silos behind one application, Fluree’s linked graph technology enables data to be shared across many environments while protected by policy, trust and privacy,” Brian Platz, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told VentureBeat .

“The graph database is based on the W3C RDF and JSON-LD standards, making it easy to access and integrate decentralized, composable data. Developers can use a variety of query languages, including SPARQL, GraphQL, FlureeQL, or even SQL for to interact with Fluree,” he added.

Along with Fluree Core, the company also offers Fluree Sense to make data in existing legacy databases, data warehouses and data lakes ready for downstream consumption and enterprise sharing.

As Platz explained, Sense automates the integration of data from multiple sources and uses machine learning and semantic ontologies to normalize, clean and harmonize the information to create an authoritative “golden record” source of truth.

While most organizations report processing only 5-15% of their total data, Fluree claims Sense can programmatically scan and fix billions of rows and clean up 90% of enterprise data in a few months. The offering was added to the Fluree ecosystem back in September 2022 following the company’s merger with New Jersey-based ZettaLabs.

Plan in advance

With the latest round, which was led by SineWave Ventures, Fluree’s total raised capital has passed $16 million. The company said it will use the money to further build its ecosystem of computing products and help more businesses use those products to move away from legacy computing infrastructure. Ultimately, the CEO said, Fluree will help companies support the growing demand for reliable, shareable and secure data for LLMs, knowledge graphs, analytics and enterprise data sharing initiatives.

“Our data management vision has always been to rebuild data architecture for the modern enterprise. As we move from ‘data as a by-product’ of applications to ‘data as the product’, Fluree will provide the best-in-class data infrastructure to service this shift. We believes data should be secure, interoperable, reliable, semantically linked and accessible,” noted Platz.

The company claims to have more than 100,000 downloads of its open source graph database, with documented use cases in domains such as verifiable credentials, education technology, enterprise knowledge graphs, and blockchain applications. In 2021, the technology was used to secure academic credentials for projects funded by the Department of Education, as well as to conduct a tamper-proof blockchain-backed election for Marzex Tech.

Other companies experimenting with blockchain databases and networks include BigchainDB, ProvenDB, TerminusDB, Modex Tech, and Streamr.