Pau Alto-based data analytics start-up Blockfenders has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed funding round from a group of investors. 

The round saw participation from investors including Blume Ventures, Together Fund, Veda VC, Behind Genius Ventures, Better Capital, Arka Venture Labs, Global Devc, FortyTwo, Eximius Ventures, GSF Fund, Pointone, Upsparks. Additionally, individual investors like founder and chairman of Persistent Systems,  Anand Deshpande, engineering leader at Microsoft, Rashid Mayes, founder and CEO at IndiaMart.com, Dinesh Agarwal, COO at IndiaMart.com, Dinesh Gulati, investor and sports presenter, Gaurav Kapur, General Partner at Wagmi Ventures, Henry Zitou, and CEO and joint MD at Nazara Technology, Nitish Mittersain also joined. 

The company will utilise the prospects to strengthen its blockchain-driven data-sharing platform. Additionally, the company is eying to grow the team further, build new capabilities like supporting multiple data sources and tokenisation, and expand its presence in industries such as healthcare, banking and financial services, enterprises, and technology.

Blockfenders was co-founded in 2022 by Viraj Phanse and Niranjan Ingale with the aim of making it easier to securely exchange data across borders. Prior to the company, Viraj worked with  AWS, Oracle, Persistent and Aerospike while  Niranjan worked with engineering teams at AllScripts and Persistent.

In a statement, the company claims to build a team of 10 members in just nine months. 

Speaking about the investment into Blockfenders, Sanjay Nath, the managing partner and co-founder of Blume Ventures, said, “What excited us about Blockfenders was Viraj and Niranjan’s articulation of the expansive scope of the problem statement and the promising tailwinds associated with it. enterprises and healthcare and BFSI companies today struggle with setting up and managing zero trust data-management platforms and Blockfender’s unique positioning and inherent technology moat is well poised to solve that.”

Rashid Mayes, principal software engineering manager at Microsoft and co-founder at Philanthropy.AI, and also an angel investor in the current round, added, “Businesses will face a greater reliance on securely and efficiently operationalizing data from diverse sources to meet the growing analytics/actionable insights, intelligence, end-to-end observability, and personalization needs of modern applications and services. Blockfenders’ platform enables organizations to break data silos and drive more value from data without sacrificing privacy, governance, or integrity.”

Niranjan Ingale co-founder and CTO at Blockfenders, added, “We are democratizing data sharing by enabling businesses research and non-technical folks to share data from their own environment without writing any code or worrying about privacy, security and implementation. Now organizations can easily establish a single source of truth of data and share data in a fine-grained manner while meeting stringent regulations and compliances.”