Blockchain infrastructure company Calimero Network said today that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to build private sharding capabilities for blockchain networks.

The seed funding round was co-led by the crypto venture investment firms Khosla Ventures, Lyrik Ventures and the blockchain network Near Foundation. The funding round was closed in November 2022 and also saw participation from GSR, FJ Labs, NetZero Capital, Warburg Serres and additional angel investors.

Calimero’s network grew out of the Near protocol, which is a scalable blockchain designed to provide a high-performance experience for developers to deploy applications. The network’s founders used Near’s technology as a foundation to launch Calimero in 2020 to build private sharding technology, which allows the creation of blockchains on private subnets that can exchange data while protecting sensitive information.

Using sharding, the ledgers, data and computation of the blockchain are split up into several different and separate segments. These segments are completely separate and private from one another and only interact based on specific rules that keep the data private and secure. These shards can also interact with public blockchains in order to maintain the benefits of having interoperability with blockchains such as Ethereum.

As a result, Calimero says, it maintains the performance benefits of the Near protocol, while providing the high security and privacy of shards. It essentially delivers the capability of allowing companies to create networks within networks.

In this manner, a single company can have a large umbrella blockchain and then have sub-blockchains for each internal organization, each of which can run its own isolated blockchain network, also known as a shard, and exchange data.

Alternatively, this can be done across companies in the same supply chain that desire to share detailed information about the product moving through the chain but want to retain certain proprietary information within their own private blockchain ledgers while maintaining the entire chain’s integrity.

Calimero has two versions available for institutional users, a business console and an enterprise version. The console version is an out-of-the-box solution that is ready to go almost immediately for customers with very little technical knowledge and is designed to get businesses operating using blockchain technology as quickly as possible. The second is an enterprise version designed for professional users who want to customize the solution for their product fit and offers an on-premises solution for regulated environments.

Currently, the company is focused on the Near protocol, since that’s the foundation on which the project is built.

However, the company is also working toward building out to work with any blockchain that can operate using the Ethereum Virtual Machine via Aurora Labs‘ Aurora, which is an Ethereum-compatible scaling solution built on the Near protocol. This will allow applications running on Calimero to interact with any Ethereum-compatible blockchain, opening up a much broader audience of developers and potential apps.

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