SIMBA Chain plans growth after $25M round
PLYMOUTH, Ind. (Inside INdiana Business) — The chief executive officer of Plymouth-based SIMBA Chain Inc. says the company’s recently-secured $25 million in Series A funding creates a “fantastic opportunity.” Joel Neidig says the blockchain technology startup, which was founded in 2017 and incubated at the University of Notre Dame, will use the funding to scale its development, sales and marketing teams with the goal of doubling its workforce to around 100 employees by the end of the year. “Over half of our company is located in Indiana, so that’s been pretty exciting to see this kind of [growth] in a company that’s a Midwest startup that’s delivering the latest technology,” said Neidig.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Neidig said the company’s growth can benefit others as well.
“We just count ourselves so fortunate to be in this kind of position, but we also think it’s a great opportunity to elevate a lot of those around us and we’ve already seen that even in some of our hires that were just getting into blockchain,” said Neidig. “We have so many startups that are using our platform, so we’ve really enabled, I think, multiple new businesses and more businesses will sprout out of SIMBA just by using our platform and building on it, they’ll create new business cases.”
SIMBA Chain has developed a platform that Neidig says simplifies blockchain for users by creating access to multiple different blockchains. The company’s technology is currently used by nearly every branch of the U.S. military, as well as Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) and several higher education institutions.
With the funding round secured, Neidig says the company’s ultimate goal is to continue to grow revenue, but also the customer base.
“We want to remain very diverse in our customer base, from education and government enterprise, and continue to grow out new use cases that we can scale into that use our platform,” he said. “At the core of everything that we use is the SIMBA enterprise platform and even the education side is harnessing that power that has been built for years of development. It’s a multi-million-dollar platform that even people that are using the ‘freemium’ account are getting access to and it’s very powerful.”
The funding round was led by led by Valley Capital Partners in New York, with participation from Notre Dame Pit Road Fund, Elevate Ventures in Indianapolis, and Stanford Law School, as well as individuals affiliated with KKR, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and SpaceX, among several others.