SIMBA Chain, a Cloud-based, smart-contract-as-a-service (SCaaS) platform that enables users to rapidly implement decentralized applications (dapps) for blockchain, announced today that it has closed a $1.5 million seed financing round with leading venture capital and angel investors. The round closed in late December 2019.

Co-founders, Joel Neidig CEO and Dr. Ian Taylor CTO
Co-founders, Joel Neidig CEO and Dr. Ian Taylor CTO
Participating in the round are Notre Dame's Pit Road Fund, Elevate Ventures, First Source Capital, and individual angel investors. The funding will be used to hire additional sales and development personnel to accelerate market rollout and support initial execution of a number of major government contracts, including one with the U.S. Air Force to secure its supply chain on battlefields and at home. Serial entrepreneur Joel Neidig, who co-founded SIMBA Chain with University of Notre Dame faculty members Ian Taylor and Jarek Nabrzyski, leads the company as CEO. Taylor is SIMBA Chain's CTO, while Nabrzyski is a board member.

"SIMBA Chain was created so government and corporate entities can address the growing global threat to IT security posed by international 'bad actors' as well as individual hackers using blockchain. Our platform makes it simple for people with varying skillsets to quickly deploy dapps by auto-generating custom API that is not dependent on a single blockchain or distributed ledger technology," Neidig explains. "SIMBA Chain's democratization of blockchain enables more organizations to eliminate the vulnerability of a single point of failure inherent in current IT enterprises by creating an immutable repository where once data is stored, it can't be tampered with, changed or deleted."

With this seed round under his belt, Neidig is excited about what 2020 holds for SIMBA Chain. "In 2019, we made some strategic hires and participated in key industry events like Microsoft's Inspire conference that launched SIMBA Chain to Microsoft's dealer base and Disrupt Berlin, where we were a TechCrunch Top Pick. Now it's time to grow!"

As part of the funding round, Bryan Ritchie will be joining the SIMBA Chain board of directors. Ritchie is a vice president and the Cathy and John Martin Associate Provost for Innovation at Notre Dame. He also leads the IDEA Center, the University's hub for innovation and commercialization.

"Notre Dame is committed to becoming one of the nation's leading entrepreneurial and commercialization universities and has committed significant resources to advance faculty, student, alumni, and community startup companies and technology. The technology underpinning SIMBA Chain was developed at Notre Dame and the company itself was founded by community partners and faculty. I am particularly honored to serve on SIMBA Chain's board of directors and help shepherd the company to commercial success, but equally important, have a role in transforming how data is stored, shared, and secured around the globe," said Ritchie.

About SIMBA Chain, Inc.
SIMBA Chain was established in 2017 as the result of a grant awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing and ITAMCO to develop a secure, unhackable messaging and transaction platform for the U.S. military. SIMBA Chain's cloud-based, smart-contract-as-a-service (SCaaS) platform enables users, developers, government, and enterprises to quickly develop and deploy blockchain dapps for iOS, Android, and the web. SIMBA Chain is the recipient of TechPoint's 2019 Mira Award for New Product of the Year and 1st Source Bank's Commercialization Award.