Enterprise-Focused Blockchain Startup Settlemint Raises $16M – Ledger Insights
Yesterday, Belgian blockchain startup Settlemint announced a €16 million ($16m) Series A funding round led by the UK’s Molten Ventures and Netherlands-based OTB Ventures. Other new backers include Fujitsu Ventures, Allusion and Bloccelerate, along with existing investor Medici Ventures.
The startup is a low-code middleware company that makes it easier and faster for businesses to develop blockchain solutions across a range of blockchain technologies. It has solutions across multiple industries including NFT, banking, supply chain and energy.
“When we launched SettleMint in 2016, we saw the benefits that companies would gain from integrating blockchain applications into their existing systems, but also knew that there was no easy way for developers to achieve this,” said Matthew Van Niekerk, SettleMint’s co-founder and CEO.
“As practitioners, we also recognized the recurring and predictable challenges that every blockchain implementation faces, and that enterprise-class implementations have very high security, scalability and interoperability requirements.”
The funds will be used to expand its existing presence in Belgium, Dubai, Delhi and Singapore and establish a new office in Japan with the help of Fujitsu. While Fujitsu is now an investor, the startup has worked with the Japanese firm for years as a channel partner.
For example, a trial of product transparency by beer giant AB InBev in 2020 involved Settlemint together with Fujitsu. The Japanese tech giant is no slouch when it comes to blockchain as one of the founders of the Hyperledger Cacti interoperability protocol.
Both Bloccelerate and Medici Ventures have experience with blockchain-focused venture investment. For example, Medici is a backer of CBDC development firm Bitt, Medici Land Governance and security token firm tZero, which recently attracted investment from NYSE owner ICE.
“While there is massive demand for implementing blockchain solutions and applications, there is a corresponding shortage of blockchain expertise,” said Vinoth Jayakumar, partner at Molten Ventures. “SettleMint bridges this gap by allowing developers to build web3 products and focus on end-product business use cases, not on underlying complex blockchain infrastructure.”
Settlemint used to brand itself as a blockchain enterprise firm, although it has supported both public and private blockchains from its early days. What it really means is that it is aimed at business use. The permissioned blockchains supported by Settlemint include Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu and R3’s Corda. And the public blockchains include Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain.
Each blockchain middleware company has a completely different offering. But in that group we will include Kaleido, SIMBA Chain and Finboot. The smart contract language DAML also supports several blockchain technologies.
