Blockchain database startup BigchainDB raises €3 million

Baozou Comment : Blockchain startup BigchainDB has raised 3 million euros, led by Earlybird Ventures, to develop a blockchain database that supports TB or even PB-level capacity. The company will blockchainize the existing database architecture. Blockchain is used to ensure the fairness of data acquisition channels and the rights of data owners. At present, the company's related applications have many customers, mainly used for tracing and discovering illegal activities.

Translation: Annie_Xu

BigchainDB, a blockchain startup working to expand the capacity of blockchain for enterprise applications, has raised €3 million ($3.37 million) in venture capital to develop a blockchain database, like the ledger that runs on the bitcoin blockchain.

Earlybird Ventures led the round, with participation from Anthemis Group, RWE Ventures, innogy SE and Digital Currency Group. BigchainDB’s Series A funding goal is to expand the number of corporate employees and improve the security of internal systems.

Although traditional databases are centrally controlled, BigchainDB hopes to build a database with "blockchain characteristics" that is controlled by users.

Bruce Pon, co-founder and CEO of BigchainDB, said:

“Blockchain provides fair access to assets. We still need middlemen, but the access becomes fair. They don’t own your data like Google, Amazon or Apple do.”

The company currently has a total of 15 employees at its headquarters in Berlin, Germany, and will use the funds raised this time to recruit three developers and a business development manager.

Currently, most of the company's revenue comes from consulting sessions for a few days or working with third-party companies to develop proof-of-concept mechanisms; but eventually the company hopes to generate revenue by selling software licenses.

The funding round was launched shortly after BigchainDB launched a $2 million funding round for intellectual property product Ascribe in early 2015. The company has since changed its name, and while it still offers Ascribe products to old customers, development work on the platform has ceased.

Pon said Ascribe was an important stepping stone for the company because it expanded the platform onto the bitcoin blockchain, giving it the opportunity to explore more scalable distributed ledgers.

Blockchain

Pon described the company's work as "taking existing database architecture and then blockchainizing it."

Provenance startup Everledger is the company’s first client, setting up nodes for art galleries to share the ownership history of artworks or to detect fraud in the global diamond market.

Although this work is still in its infancy, the company has already secured a number of clients; for example, investor RWE is working on building a “shared autonomous factory”; Capgemini is developing loyalty products; and Eris Industries is building an enterprise-grade blockchain application stack.

Pon said that to meet enterprise needs, he and co-founders Trent and Masha McConaghy are working on blending various blockchain features, such as decentralized control, immutability, and digital asset creation, with more traditional database features, such as the NoSQL query language and faster transaction speeds.

The software can be downloaded by anyone, whether or not they are a customer of the company. Currently anyone can generate a node network.

Earlier this year, BigchainDB launched the IPDB Foundation, a non-profit consortium of 15 nodes for clients looking to join an existing open network. The nodes are managed by non-profits Archive.org and the Open Media Foundation, as well as for-profits Protocol Labs and ConsenSys.

Trent McConaghy

This enables a network that routinely handles 100,000 transactions per second and sometimes exceeds 1 million, said Trent McConaghy, the company’s chief technology officer.

"We can support TB or even PB levels of capacity because that's the function of a distributed big database."