Comcast VC Backs Blockchain Startup

Comcast Ventures participated in a $3.275 million seed round in Blockdaemon, a startup that has developed a “nodes as a service” Platform to enable businesses to simplify and manage blockchain applications.

Boldstart, MState, Plug and Play and some angels from Silicon Valley also participated in the seed financing.

Blockdaemon, founded in 2017, plans to use the funds to grow its engineering team from 10 to 20 in the next six months, beef up its infrastructure options and help customers run multi-tenant networks for different blockchains, company CEO Konstantin Richter explained in this blog post.

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“We chose a VC round, over a crowdsale, to ensure we have investors with real enterprise chops on deck that can help us run a focused agile development process,” he noted, adding that Blockdaemon is also announcing a new product this week that enables the deployment and connection of public Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes, payable via crypto and credit cards.

Blockdaemon has also set up pricing for public, private and enterprise rollouts.

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Richter is late of Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, Nokia and PriceWaterhouse, and CTO Arun Kalaiselvan is formerly with Vizbee, Voray, PlaceIQ and Lookbooks. Adam Helfgott, the CEO of Madhive and co-founder of Lookbooks and e-camp, is an advisor to Blockdaemon.

Comcast’s investment in the startup comes as the company gets more deeply involved in Blockchain, a system that creates a trusted way to share digital information from multiple entities while also keeping that core data protected and validated even as those records change using a distributed, decentralized structure.

For its part, Comcast has already been starting to develop Blockchain technologies for connected home and TV advertising applications.

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Last month,Coindesk expanded on Comcast’s interest in blockchain, noting that Comcast Ventures has also provided backing to MState, an accelerator for blockchain startups, and to Blockchange Ventures. Gil Beyda, managing director at Comcast Ventures, told the pub that the VC has established a “blockchain crew” that’s focused on the sector.