Maersk Leads Blockchain of Food Startup Ripe.io $2.4m Seed Round

• Ripe.io, a start-up that uses blockchain technology to ensure traceability and transparency in the food supply chain, has raised USD2.4m in seed funding in a round led by the venture arm of global container logistics company Maersk. Relish Works, a food services company-backed innovation lab, also invested.

• Ripe.io’s blockchain platform connects farmers, distributors, processors, traders, restaurants, grocers, and consumers, allowing them to record and share data on aspects of a food’s journey from farm to fork using IoT devices.

• The platform ensures agreement between all parties before any data point is changed.

• Initially, the Ripe.io platform will be offered on a software-as-a-service basis, but will eventually evolve into a fully licensed API and transactional product.

Comments

• Maersk continues to show interest in blockchain technology – the company already has blockchain projects addressing use cases such as container insurance and container tracking.

• Food provenance on a blockchain is a well discussed use case, with projects such as Everledger and the Walmart/Unilever/Kroger/IBM project gaining a high profile in the media and at blockchain conferences.

• The architecture of the Ripe.io platform is not clear from the Ripe.io website, and we wonder to what degree the platform is ‘distributed’, noting a lack of references to this key concept of blockchain by both the media and the company.

• In the absence of a decentralised architecture, then, Ripe.io appears as a kind of centralised ‘certificate authority’, similar to the role played by GeoTrust in certifying software updates.

What do you think?

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