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February 2021

Our Investment in Vendia: The New Standard for Data Sharing

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We’re excited to announce that Canvas Ventures has led the $15.5M Series A of Vendia alongside BMWi Ventures and Sorenson Ventures and seed investors Neotribe, Hummer Winblad, Westwave Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Future/Perfect. 

We are excited because we believe the future is in efficient collaboration across organizations and Vendia’s proprietary technology is enabling organizations to do so in a more secure and scalable way than ever before. At Canvas, we back visionary founders building transformative companies, and we believe Vendia is poised to be the new standard for data sharing across clouds, geographies and organizations. 


The Growing Inter-Org Data Collaboration Problem 

Current tech architecture across companies (ERP, CRM, BI) was built for intra org collaboration and not inter collaboration. This pain point is felt acutely today by those dealing with sensitive supply-chain, transaction and healthcare data. These companies need to keep data close to them and are often managing hundreds of thousands of rows of data in any given hour. On top of this, they need to collaborate with different partners in their ecosystem who are often in different geographies, clouds and with varying levels of data and IT sophistication. And sharing this data has meaningful multi-million ROI for businesses - saving costs by tracking food items throughout a national supply chain, identifying the origin of damaged parts in a car’s manufacturing, or providing faster time to transaction resolution. 

As GDPR and data governance regulations increase, more organizations need to share data responsibly and securely cross-organization than ever before. Simultaneously, as data grows the bigger the opportunity is for collaboration, and Vendia’s managed service enables organizations to effortlessly adopt next-gen data standards without expensive investment in systems or products in-house.

A turnkey distributed approach

Vendia’s fundamental platform innovation — the scalable ledger system — makes it now very economical to build new apps that enable an enterprise to easily get all their suppliers, partners and customers to contribute to the system of record. Its distributed model was more powerful than central control and Vendia’s team had the foresight to innovate the existing architecture to make this possible.

Enterprises can now take advantage of this cutting edge technology without having to make upfront infrastructure investment, hiring a new breed of developers or retooling their existing tech stack. Vendia's pay as you go model integrates very easily with popular ingress mechanisms such as IOT, Mobile, APIs and egress into SAP, AI/ML, analytics solutions and more.

Vendia enables anyone with data of any type (structured, unstructured, imagery) of any cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) and any geography (Europe, Asia, US) to quickly deploy a sophisticated data sharing infrastructure with just a few lines of code or as a service off the AWS marketplace (not running their own servers or custom architecture.) They have already proven their model with blue-chip customers including UNFI, BMW and Best Friends Animal Society who have been able to replace multi-million dollar centralized architecture projects with Vendia’s scalable ledger solution. 

An extraordinary team

From the very first time we met Dr. Tim Wagner and Shruthi Rao - we knew they were something special. Not only were both of them already very impressive executives with decades of experience on both the engineering and business development side, Tim having founded AWS Lambda and served as a GM there for several years, and later as VP of Engineering at Coinbase, and Shruthi having served as Head of BD for Amazon Managed Blockchain, but they were also incredible people and leaders. It’s a testament to the powerhouse team they’ve assembled, pulling top engineers from AWS, DynamoDB and Netlify to join forces in achieving their vision.

With Vendia, Tim and Shruthi took the opportunity to marry the strengths of both of their backgrounds and fundamentally create a new standard for data sharing that would only grow in importance over the next several decades. 

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Tim and Shruthi to the Canvas family. If you’re a prospective customer, check out Vendia Share’s developer portal and their 1-week POC. And Vendia is hiring!

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