Cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology giant VMware are leading a Series C financing round for open-source DAML smart contract language designers Digital Asset.
A company with close to 25,000 staff $15 billion in assets, VMware joins technology leaders Salesforce Ventures and Samsung Venture Investment Corp (Samsung) as investors in Digital Asset and its growing ecosystem of DAML partners.
VMware’s Brendon Howe, Vice President and General Manager, VMware Blockchain, also joined the company’s Board of Directors. Howe joined VMware in September 2019 and is responsible for leading their Blockchain business unit. Previously, he 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.
Digital Asset helps companies of all sizes and across industries get distributed applications to market faster, and stay there longer. At the core of their service offering is DAML, an open-source and platform-independent smart contract language that enables developers to write an application once and deploy it anywhere.
