Blockchain Development Platform Stratumn Raises €600k

A platform for developing enterprise blockchain applications has raised €600,000 in seed funding.

Stratumn, based in Paris, received funding from French venture capital firm Otium Venture and Eric Larchevêque, CEO of bitcoin hardware wallet startup Ledger. The company’s founding team includes Richard Caetano, developer of the bitcoin price and news ticker app btcReport, and Stephan Florquin, a former developer for French bitcoin exchange Paymium.

The company is hoping to be an early entrant in the market for enterprise blockchain development, with a particular focus on the notarization of data. Stratumn utilizes an open standard called Chainscript that creates an audit chain for workflows, tying evidence of work performed and validated on the platform to the bitcoin blockchain.

The newly raised funds, according to the startup, will be used to expand its team to a dozen employees and complete work on Chainscript as well as a blockchain notarization tool it calls ‘Fossilizer’.

Right now, Stratumn is gearing its toolkit toward applications tied to the bitcoin blockchain, but in the future the startup sees its products being used for what it anticipates will be a future with many blockchains.

Caetano told CoinDesk:

"We see a day where there will be millions of blockchains developed in the world, and we see this as a natural evolution of data technology."

Road ahead

Stratumn hopes to capture some of that anticipated demand by offering both its existing products as well as future tools like block explorers and monitoring dashboards geared toward enterprise blockchain solutions.

Caetano told CoinDesk that the startup has already begun work with a hospital in Paris as well as a French banking company.

Further, Caetano said he sees Stratumn as acting as a connection point between permissionless blockchain networks like bitcoin and Ethereum, and permissioned networks operated by financial firms and businesses.

Currently, the Stratumn platform is in private beta, following a soft launch at the beginning of this month. Caetano said that the company hopes to complete this process by the end of the summer.

"We're still shifting things, we're still refining things," he said.

Future projects include what Caetano described as a "blockchain store" similar to the cloud application platform Heroku. He characterized this work as early, with the new funding being used, in part, to begin fleshing out what that service might look like.

Looking ahead, the company is hoping raise additional funds in a Series A funding, building on the seed funding it has already raised.

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