Paris-based European blockchain security management company Stratumn SAS announced Thursday that it has completed a $7.8 million (€7 million) funding round to advance its stake in the blockchain market for regulatory compliance.

Stratumn produces solutions using blockchains, distributed cryptographically secured ledgers, designed to enhance the security and integrity of data. With a blockchain, a company can store historical data in a fashion that is difficult to tamper with and provides a record of transactions. This makes blockchain technology ideal for easing challenges with regulation and transparency.

The company boasts that it is France’s leading blockchain company in terms of staff and projects development. To this end, Stratumn has already developed more than 10 projects with large companies including CNP Assurances, Allianz France, Nasdaq, Thales, Bureau Veritas and Bouygues Immobilier.

Bruno Raillard, a partner at Otium Venture, cited what he called a massive opportunity that included over “$40 billion of potential savings on compliance and back-office costs in capital markets, insurance and energy alone.” This blockchain technology, he said, would be “about building the layer of trust that the network economy really needs to blossom.”

To assist with regulatory compliance for enterprise financial technology companies, Stratumn offers what it calls “Proof of Process Technology.” The tool suite aims to give organizations an efficient and reliable way to keep records up to date with current regulatory laws and policies, while reducing operational overhead and the costs of managing the back end. The idea is to ensure that its historical data is difficult to tamper with and also to allow regulators to audit process data in real time.

The Series A round was joined by Open CNP, the corporate venture arm of CNP Assurances, as well as Otium Venture, Nasdaq and Digital Currency Group. Stratumn intends to use the new funding to enable the company to expand operations in the United States and attract more talent to its 15-person international team. The company intends to double its size by the end of 2018.

Stratumn has also announced a specialized partnership with Nasdaq Inc., a well-known American stock exchange company. Nasdaq has shown its own strong interest in blockchain technology with regard to digital securities, commodities and stocks through its own enterprise product. Since 2015, the Nasdaq Linq platform began to grow efforts to secure digital commodities and even signed on with enterprise sector blockchain platform Chain Inc.

Nasdaq Head of Corporate Strategy Jean-Jacques Louis said that the two companies have been experimenting with blockchain products over the past year. By joining the round, the two companies are formalizing that collaboration.

The partnership between Stratumn and Nasdaq aims to use Proof of Process Technology to enhance the software solutions and products for the capital markets, particularly in Nasdaq’s Market Technology business and its own enterprise technology unit, which would include Nasdaq Linq.

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