We are excited to announce our investment in the $15M Series A round of Vendia, which has developed a serverless, distributed data and code-sharing platform that is disrupting how enterprises share data and code with partners. Vendia’s innovative platform provides a secure way for corporations to share vast amounts of data with precise and fine-tuned controls, while maintaining a single source of truth for the data across all parties. This investment reflects our belief that data is the new currency and that traditional database technologies, which do not easily enable efficient, trusted collaboration across enterprise partners, are ripe for disruption.
While companies historically tended to keep their data siloed and held privately to themselves, a new ethos has emerged that views the exchange of data across enterprise partners as critical to efficient, trustful collaboration. In fact, McKinsey estimated that ~40% of companies have formed or are forming data-sharing partnerships. Yet, despite the trend towards more open collaboration, there has been no effective solution to securely share vast amounts of data at scale. The complicated multi-cloud infrastructure and security requirements of different organizations make it difficult for collaborating companies to have a single source of truth database that all parties can access and trust. Current solutions also do not guarantee the immutability of the data, which is critical to create a shared record of truth. This can have significant negative business implications including lack of trust between the involved parties and a general distrust of the data itself, which can hamper the collaboration across parties, especially where data discrepancies arise.
In attempts to solve the issue above and restore trust in partnerships, companies have been toying with private blockchain as a means to foster more efficient, trustful data exchange across parties. However, while blockchain technology overcomes the immutability issues of existing data sharing platforms due to its decentralized architecture, there is one main flaw to the technology: scalability. This is primarily because for new data to be added to the blockchain, multiple nodes must verify the data which entails running compute-intensive algorithms, and once new data is added, every node must have a copy of the updated ledger which can sometimes require petabytes of data. The very architecture that makes blockchain so secure is also exactly why it cannot scale.
Building a scalable, distributed ledger has been impossible until now. Vendia’s innovative platform makes the impossible possible by combining two seemingly contradictory technologies: the security and immutability of distributed ledger technology and the scalability of centralized cloud computing. Unlike in traditional blockchain technology, where a distributed network of nodes that can be located anywhere in any form make up the blockchain, the nodes in Vendia’s architecture run in a cloud or multi-cloud environment operated by a neutral cloud provider. Like blockchain, these nodes maintain a system of truth for the data in a decentralized way, but unlike in blockchain, the nodes in the Vendia architecture are powered by the cloud service provider. This not only eliminates the scalability issues faced in traditional blockchain but also the trust issues that network participants might have regarding the state of the data because the nodes are controlled by a neutral, third-party cloud provider. With Vendia’s platform, corporations are able to trust in a unified and immutable data source, thereby accelerating open collaboration between partners.
We believe that Vendia is pioneering the next generation of data exchange and will usher in a new era of collaboration, as the Vendia platform is the key to unlocking truly meaningful cooperation between partners. Our support will enable Vendia to further develop its already robust data-sharing platform, as well as accelerate the timeline to bring its next-generation solution to market. We are confident that Vendia, through the leadership of Tim Wagner and Shruthi Rao, will succeed in its endeavor to disrupt how enterprises share data, and we are excited to partner with them on this journey!