Factom Lands $4.2 Million in Funding

Factom, an Austin-based blockchain technology company that secures data, announced Wednesday it has closed on $4.2 million in funding.

Billionaire Investor Tim Draper of Draper Associates led the Series A round.

Blockchain is the underlying technology for Bitcoin, an alternative currency. A blockchain is a public ledger of all bitcoin transactions that have ever been executed.

Factom has taken that technology and applied it to data security for a wide range of industries and applications. The company has created Factom Apollo and Factom Iris, built on its open source core software, aimed at securing records and identity.

Factom previously raised a few million dollars in seed stage investment. The latest round of funding will let the company further develop its core technology and products.

This summer, the Department of Homeland Security issued a $199,000 grant to Factom aimed at developing digital identity security products for Internet of Things devices.

Earlier this year, the Austin Chamber of Commerce also named Factom to its A-List of Hottest Companies for 2016 in the emerging and early/seed stage category.

“We are delighted to have venture capitalists of such caliber help us build Factom,” Peter Kirby, CEO and Co-founder of Factom said in a news release. “This round of funding allows us to aggressively grow the company and the underlying technology. We started Factom to build a more honest and transparent world using a pretty simple approach: create software that makes it impossible to change the past and point that software at places where it solves valuable business problems. This funding accelerates our progress down that road.”

“Securing data is mission critical for governments, banks, car companies, credit card companies, retailers and any company concerned with hacking,” Draper said in a news release. “Centralized data is prone to critical failure by any individual mistake, whether by user error or malicious hacking. By decentralizing data through the blockchain, Factom avoids critical failures due to user error or hacker. Factom lets people sleep easy knowing that their bank account won’t be broken into, their car won’t errantly go off the road, and their identity won’t be stolen.”

“Consensus is extremely challenging,” Paul Snow, Chief Architect and Co-founder of Factom, said in a news release. “Blockchains first pushed the boundaries of computer science with the simple yet revolutionary ability to trade digital value openly. Now we are pushing the limits of computer science in a second revolution. The Factom protocol allows for the open coordination of processes against immutable ledgers of data. It will have the same kind of impact on data and systems as the first revolution had on value.”