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SIMBA Chain raises $500,000 in pre-seed funding

 (IMAGE: JIM ALLEN/FREIGHTWAVES)
(IMAGE: JIM ALLEN/FREIGHTWAVES)

SIMBA Chain has raised $500,000 in a pre-seed financing round, according to PR Newswire. Backers of the round include Elevate Ventures, the Notre Dame Pit Road Fund, Tracy Graham (chief executive officer of Data Reality) and Hari Agarwal (chief executive officer of AECI International).

SIMBA Chain is a cloud-based, blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform which enables users to implement decentralized applications (dapps), which don’t require third-party partners to manage.

SIMBA Chain will use the recent round of investment to continue developing its BaaS platform to increase the accessibility of blockchain distributed apps. Agarwal will also be joining SIMBA Chain’s board of directors.

SIMBA Chain was founded in 2017 with a grant awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Companies (ITMCO) and the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame. The purpose of the grant was to create a secure messaging and transaction platform for the U.S. military.

SIMBA Chain recently secured a contract with the U.S. Air Force to improve its supply chain capabilities according to PR Newswire.

“Using SIMBA you can basically use a user interface to create and model your business application,” Joel Neidig, chief executive officer at SIMBA Chain, told Microsoft for Startups. “You define the assets along with the parameters you need, click go, and it automatically writes a smart contract, which is essentially interfaced to the blockchain. It reduces the development time into the blockchain and it enables very fast prototyping and development as well.”

“The [Notre Dame] Pit Road Fund is excited to partner with and invest in SIMBA,” said Bryan Ritchie, general partner at the fund. “Their blockchain technology has the potential to eliminate a significant amount of record-keeping, allowing for significant costs savings and a reduction in burdensome paperwork.”