WINSTON-SALEM – Fluree will merge with ZettaLabs, the Winston-Salem company announced in a statement on 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 together the two companies and all of the employees into the Fluree ecosystem.
Fluree PBC was co-founded in 2016 by Brian Platz, CEO, and Flip Filipowski, and is headquartered in Winston-Salem.
The platform build by the company “organizes blockchain-secured data in a scalable semantic graph database,” according to the statement, based on a 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 “pacesetter” in adopting such standards.
“We are building the data infrastructure for the future,” said Platz 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 in order to build their end-goal infrastructures.”
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According to research conducted by Coleman Parkes between March and April 2020, nearly 74% of organizations fail to complete legacy data migration projects.
In merging the two companies, Fluree aims to assist large organizations in completing 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 offer an integrated solution to enterprise data management teams that sought to build semantic-capable, secure data fabrics, 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, cleanse and harmonize data from disparate data sources.”
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In short, the product will enable enterprise companies to ready their data for use across their organizations. Fluree also won three U.S. governmental contracts in 2021.
“We developed our flagship product, ZettaSense, to ingest, classify, resolve and cleanse 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 data technical architecture — with multiple operational data stores, warehouses and lakes, now spreading out across multiple clouds — is continuing to grow in complexity.”
Together, the merged company believes that they’ll be able to serve nine in 10 businesses “hindered 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, primarily from its founders, though 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 an additional $6.5 million in 2020.
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