Blockchain middleware startup Bluzelle Networks Inc. today announced it has raised $1.5 million in an early-stage funding to develop the company’s distributed ledger storage platform.

Bluzelle builds middleware applications for the enterprise using blockchain networks and tools that make use of cryptographic distributed ledgers in order to protect a record of historical transactions. With this technology, the company has planned out applications and tools to support financial institutions, payment networks and insurance providers.

“The blockchain is a protocol, just like the internet is a communication protocol,” Pavel Bains, co-founder and chief executive officer of Bluzelle, told Tech in Asia. Bains explained that the company’s platform extends blockchains by providing additional application layers, similar to what Oracle Corp. does by building on top of the Windows operating system.

“Different blockchains are complementary systems,” Bains said in an interview with Coindesk. “For data storage in a decentralized world we might use ethereum, we might use Hyperledger, or other options as the operating system – and we’ll use Bluzelle for the data storage and management.”

Bluzelle’s planned platform is a distributed, scalable database that provides a cheap solution for businesses and developers to securely store and operate on information. Distributed applications, also called DApps, act as high-level management using the platform to retrieve information, update records and coordinate access.

With this platform logic, Bluzelle is similar to storage blockchain startups such as Storj Labs Inc. and Protocol Labs’ Filecoin. Storj launched its own cloud-based file storage blockchain in February, which allows users to offer up unused storage space on servers and computers to become part of the network. Protocol Labs raised nearly $250 million this month for Filecoin by crowdfunding its own internal tokens.

The funding for this Series A round for Bluzelle came from three investors: Global Brain, LUN Partners Capital and True Global. Bains said he intends to use the money to expand the startup’s storage platform and middleware development capabilities to support more blockchain applications.

Even with these funds, Bluzelle intends to raise even more capital with its own initial coin offering, or ICO, which is a crowdsale of the platform’s tokens used to operate the service. In October, Bluzelle intends to begin selling Bluzelle Tokens. These tokens will serve as an incentive system to pay community hardware operators for offering storage space and bandwidth for the platform.

Image: Bluzelle