Private blockchain sharding startup Calimero raises $8.5 million

Blockchain infrastructure company Calimero Network said today that it raised $8.5 million in seed funding to build private sharding capabilities for blockchain networks.

The seed funding round was led by crypto venture investment firms Khosla Ventures, Lyrik Ventures and blockchain network Near Foundation. The funding round closed in November 2022 and also saw participation from GSR, FJ Labs, NetZero Capital, Warburg Serres and several angel investors.

Calimero’s network grew out of the Near protocol, which is a scalable blockchain designed to provide a high-performance experience for developers to deploy applications. The network’s founders used Near’s technology as a basis to launch Calimero in 2020 to build private sharding technology that enables the creation of blockchains on private subnets that can exchange data while protecting sensitive information.

With the help of sharding, the ledger, data and calculation of the blockchain is divided into several different and separate segments. These segments are completely separate and private from each other and interact only based on specific rules that keep the data private and secure. These shards can also interact with public blockchains to maintain the benefits of having interoperability with blockchains like Ethereum.

As a result, Calimero maintains the performance benefits of the Near protocol while providing high security and privacy to shards. It essentially provides the opportunity to allow companies to create networks within networks.

In this way, a single company can have a large umbrella blockchain and then have sub-blockchains for each internal organization, each of which can run its own isolated blockchain network (also known as a shard) and exchange data.

Alternatively, this can be done across companies in the same supply chain that want to share detailed information about the product moving through the chain, but want to keep certain proprietary information in their own private blockchain ledgers, while maintaining the integrity of the entire chain.

Calimero has two versions available for institutional users, an enterprise console and an enterprise version. The console version is an out-of-the-box solution that is ready to go almost immediately for customers with very little technical knowledge and is designed to get businesses operating using blockchain technology as quickly as possible. The other is an enterprise version designed for professional users who want to customize the solution for their product customization and offers a local solution for regulated environments.

For now, the company is focused on the Near protocol, as it is the basis for the entire project.

However, the company is also working on expanding to work with any blockchain that can operate using the Ethereum Virtual Machine via Aurora from Aurora Labs, which is an Ethereum-compatible scaling solution built on the Near protocol. This will allow applications running on Calimero to interact with any Ethereum-compatible blockchain, opening up a much wider audience of developers and potential apps.

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