This week, U.S.-based blockchain firm SIMBA Chain announced it completed a $1.5 million seed financing round from Notre Dame’s Pit Road Fund, Elevate Ventures, First Source Capital and individual angel investors.
SIMBA Chain offers a cloud-based smart contract as a service platform to enable enterprises to deploy decentralized applications (dApps) for blockchain speedily. The company said it would use the funding to build a sales team to accelerate its market rollout and support initial execution of several major government contracts, including one with the U.S. Air Force.
Founded in 2017, SIMBA Chain was borne out of a grant awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to the computing department of the University of Notre Dame and Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Companies (ITAMCO). It has since transformed into a full-fledged company, and last year participated in Microsoft’s Inspire conference and Disrupt Berlin.
The company is headed by Joel Neidig, who co-founded SIMBA Chain with University of Notre Dame faculty members Ian Taylor (CTO) and Jarek Nabrzyski (board member). SIMBA’s blockchain currently supports Quorum, JP Morgan’s enterprise version of Ethereum. It plans to add Stellar soon.
“Our platform makes it simple for people with varying skillsets to quickly deploy dApps by auto-generating custom API that is not dependent on a single blockchain or distributed ledger technology,” said Neidig.
He added, “SIMBA Chain’s democratization of blockchain enables more organizations to eliminate the vulnerability of a single point of failure inherent in current IT enterprises by creating an immutable repository where once data is stored, it can’t be tampered with, changed or deleted.”
Meanwhile, the University of Notre Dame’s first vice president and associate provost for innovation, Bryan Ritchie, will be joining the SIMBA Chain board of directors.
Last year, Ledger Insights reported that SIMBA Chain was contracted by both the U.S. Navy and Air Force to develop a parts traceability solution. For the Air Force, the project aimed to prevent tampering with 3D printing designs.
