Blockchain database startup BigchainDB received $3.37 million in Series A funding led by EarlyBird, with participation from digital currency companies and others

Blockchain database startup BigchainDB has raised €3 million ($3.37 million) in Series A funding as it seeks to expand blockchain’s enterprise applications.

The funding was led by EarlyBird, with participation from Anthemis Group, RWE, innogy SE and Digital Currency. BigchainDB will use the funds to help scale the company and advance product security.

Traditional databases are centrally controlled, but BigchainDB is working on creating a database with 'blockchain characteristics' that is controlled by the users.

Bruce Pon, co-founder and CEO of BigchainDB, said:

“Blockchain provides a way for people to have equal access to assets. There will still be intermediaries, but everyone will have equal access to the content on the blockchain. They won’t hold your data like Google, Apple, or Amazon do.”

The company currently has 15 employees at its Berlin headquarters, and will use the funds raised to hire three new developers and a business development manager.

In early 2015, BigchainDB raised $2 million for its intellectual property product Ascribe. The company has since rebranded and, while it still offers Ascribe products to customers, the platform has ceased development.

“Blockchainization”

Pon described the work his company does by saying they ' start with existing database infrastructure and blockchain it. '

The traceability startup Everledger is their first customer, using BigchainDB's technology to set up nodes for art galleries to help them share the ownership history of artworks or detect fraud in global jewelry transactions.

While this work is still in its early stages, current clients include RWE , an investor in the funding round, which is currently working on creating a ‘shared autonomous factory’, Capagemini , which is creating a loyalty product, and Eris Industries , which is creating an enterprise-grade blockchain application stack.

To meet enterprise needs, Pon and his co-founders Trent and Masha McConaghy set out to blend blockchain features like decentralized control, immutability and create digital assets with more traditional database features, including a full-featured NoSQL query language and faster transaction speeds.

However, users do not have to be customers of the company to download their software. Currently, anyone can set up a node alliance and build their own network.

For those looking to join an existing open network, BigchainDB launched the IPDB Foundation earlier this year, a non-profit federation of about 15 nodes managed by non-profits such as Archive.org, the Open Media Foundation, and a few for-profits such as Protocol Labs and ConsenSys.

According to company CTO Trent McConaghy, the goal is to create a network that can handle 100,000 transactions per second, and possibly more than 1 million transactions per second.

McConaghy said:

“We’re all capable of handling petabytes and even terabytes of data because that’s the power of distributed big data databases.”