WS blockchain company Fluree merges with NJ AI startup

WINSTON-SALEM – Fluree will merge with ZettaLabs, the Winston-Salem company announced in a statement Thursday.

ZettaLabs is a New Jersey-based company whose products use artificial intelligence and machine learning, according to the statement, and the merger will bring the two companies and all of their employees into the Fluree ecosystem.

Co-founded in 2016 by Brian Platz, CEO, and Flip Filipowski, Fluree PBC is headquartered in Winston-Salem.

The platform built by the company “organizes blockchain-secured data into a scalable semantic graph database,” according to the statement, based on the foundation of a set of World Wide Web Consortium semantic web standards. WRAL TechWire reported in December 2021 that the company was something of a “pace setter” in adopting such standards.

“We are building the data infrastructure for the future,” Platz said in the statement. “While many of our customers enjoy the unique benefits of our semantic graph distributed ledger database technology, we recognize that organizations first need a way out of their entrenched silos to build their end-to-end infrastructure.”

Winston-Salem startup Fluree is emerging as a pacesetter in Web3

Meet Fluree Sense

According to research conducted by Coleman Parkes between March and April 2020, nearly 74% of organizations fail to complete legacy data migration projects.

By merging the two companies, Fluree aims to help large organizations complete these processes while focusing on security, governance and semantic interoperability, the statement noted. Fluree partnered with another North Carolina company, Lead Semantics, in June 2021 to provide an integrated solution to enterprise data management teams seeking to build semantically-compliant, secure data structures, WRAL TechWire reported.

The merger with ZettaLabs also includes a rebranding of a product built by ZettaSense, which will now be known as Fluree Sense. According to the statement, this product is a “data pipeline that uses AI and machine learning, as well as ontologies, to normalize, clean and harmonize data from different data sources.”

Fluree and Lead Semantics, two NC technology startups, are collaborating on a new product

Enables data transformation

In short, the product will enable enterprise businesses to prepare their data for use across organizations. Fluree also won three US government contracts in 2021.

“We developed our flagship product, ZettaSense, to ingest, classify, resolve and clean big data coming from a variety of sources,” said Eliud Polanco, co-founder and CEO of ZettaLabs, who will become Fluree’s president, according to the statement. “The problem is that the underlying computing architecture—with multiple operational data stores, warehouses and lakes, now spread across multiple clouds—continues to grow in complexity.”

Together, the merged company believes they will be able to serve nine out of 10 businesses “hampered by legacy infrastructure and database systems that do not have the toolset or talent to undergo an effective transformation,” according to the statement.

Fluree launched in 2016, backed by $2 million invested in the company, mostly from the founders but including some friends and family capital, according to a WRAL TechWire profile of the company in 2017. The company raised $4.7 million in 2019 and another $6.5 million in 2020.

Fluree, a Filipowski-led blockchain startup, closes on $6.5 million in new capital