VMware joins Samsung and Salesforce as investor in Series C funding round of blockchain startup Digital Asset

We wrote about Digital Asset back in December of last year after the New York City-based blockchain startup closed $35 million in Series C funding to capture smart contract market with DAML. Since then, the startup has been attracting interest from corporate heavyweights and VC investors.

Today, Digital Asset announced today that VMware has joined the company’s Series C financing round, which was announced last December. With the investment, VMware joins technology leaders Salesforce Ventures and Samsung Venture Investment Corp (Samsung) as investors in Digital Asset and its growing ecosystem of DAML partners.

Founded in 2014 by Don Wilson, Sunil Hirani, Digital Asset develops distributed ledger technology intended to build distributed, encrypted straight through processing tools. Its technology offer tools for digital ledgers to track and settle digital and mainstream financial assets in a cryptographically secure environment, enabling the financial services industry to improve their efficiency, security, compliance and settlement speed.

VMware’s Brendon Howe, Vice President and General Manager, VMware Blockchain, also joined the company’s Board of Directors. Brendon Howe joined VMware in September 2019 and is responsible for leading their Blockchain business unit. Previously, Brendon served as the SVP and GM of Cloud Data Services at NetApp after running their Emerging Products division.

“Digital Asset’s partnership with VMware provides a truly enterprise grade blockchain offering that meets the requirements of even the most demanding use cases across a range of markets,” said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset. “Brendon brings tremendous technical leadership within networking, storage, and virtualization to Digital Asset’s board.”

DAML is a state-of-the-art framework for building connected applications that span data silos and trust boundaries, changing how businesses collaborate across industries. Digital Asset partners with technology infrastructure providers to integrate DAML smart contracts with their blockchain, database or cloud technologies. Digital Asset’s partners provide commercial integrations with modern infrastructures, such as VMware Blockchain, to enable ambitious teams to build fundamentally new products.

“Digital Asset’s simple and powerful business logic approach helps customers build distributed multi-party applications much faster,” said Brendon Howe, vice president and general manager, VMware Blockchain. “The combination of DAML and VMware’s blockchain products is an exciting business opportunity for both of us, and we look forward to expanding our collaboration.”

In April 2019, Digital Asset announced a partnership with VMware to integrate DAML with VMware Blockchain. Subsequently, further integrations were announced with Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, and Besu, R3’s Corda, Chinese blockchain FISCO BCOS, Amazon’s QLDB and Aurora databases, as well as DAML cloud service, project:DABL, making DAML the most widely supported smart contract language in the world.