Blockchain tech startup Lum Network raises $4M to build the first decentralized trust layer for companies of the future

Lum Network, a blockchain tech startup building the first decentralized protocol for businesses to build authentic trust with their customers, has raised $4 million in a private Sale round led by a number of key crypto and technology investors.

The round also included Cosmos ecosystem participants such as Peng Zhong, CEO of Tendermint, as well as other contributors to Osmosis, Cosmos, and Tendermint like Cosmostation, SG-1, Stakefish, and Sentinel. In addition, the round saw participation from Arcanum Capital, Klub and Ki Foundation, SwissBorg, plus successful entrepreneurs such as Owen Simonin, CEO of Just Mining, and Djamel Agaoua, CEO of major instant messaging platform Viber.

Lum is the evolution of Sandblock, a project founded in 2017 by Sarah-Diane Eck and Fabrice Bascoulergue, and built in collaboration with SaaS company Skeepers. Lum Network is an innovative project aiming to use blockchain immutability in consumer use cases. The startup provides a decentralized review system to help consumers make the right, informed choice for their products.

In partnership with Skeepers, Lum is building an on-chain review system that would enable businesses to provide trusted reviews by timestamping them and immutably storing them on the Lum Network blockchain, which is based on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus model.

Skeepers is a leading group in customer engagement specialized in User Generated Content (UGC), such as rating & reviews, influencers, with over 30 million reviews collected yearly and 100+ million unique users reached. With Lum Network becoming the backbone of Skeepers technical infrastructure, users can be rewarded transparently and fairly for creating content and engaging with brands.

Reviews are one of the most valuable decision-making factors for consumers, with over 95% of users reading them before purchasing a particular product. It is no surprise that due to their importance, reviews are some of the most gamed aspects of retail commerce, with companies nearly always incentivizing reviews associated with good ratings through a spectrum of clean and not-so-clean measures. Conversely, they will try to nullify bad ratings as much as possible.

Foul play aside though, there are natural human elements at play as well: a consumer is much more likely to talk about extreme experiences (terrible or great), with middle-of-the-ground users rarely contributing.

With Lum, reviewer authors will be rewarded in LUM based on the quality of their content. By utilizing a unique incentive model where the quality of the reviews, rather than the review sentiment itself, are monetarily incentivized, Lum can help businesses paint a more realistic picture of their consumer satisfaction metrics, while new potential clients can accurately evaluate the quality of the products.

“We think the time has come for more mainstream uses of blockchain that would impact the real world,” said Sarah-Diane Eck, co-founder of Lum Network. “Since we started in 2016, the space has matured tremendously. Now, we’re ready to launch a large-scale use case that will directly impact consumers’ lives by adding value to the content they produce. We are very proud to build this in the Cosmos ecosystem, which I consider one of the most promising blockchain ecosystems.”

“Enabling accessibility to blockchain for a wider audience to benefit has been a key priority for me and our work at Tendermint. I am excited to support Lum Network in their efforts to impact consumers’ lives through positive user experience which I highly value with my background in interactive design.” Peng Zeng, CEO of Tendermint.

“Arcanum Capital is proud to support Lum Network, a Tendermint-powered protocol bringing an innovative way to leverage incentives to bring trust to one of the most used products today, reviews. We believe this will be an excellent addition to the COSMOS ecosystem and will benefit hugely from IBC (Inter-blockchain communication).” said James McDowall, General Partner at Arcanum Capital.