Blockchain customer relationship management startup Cere Network has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding to help it develop what it claims is the world’s first blockchain CRM and customer data platform ecosystem.

The funding, which follows the company’s graduation from the Binance Lab’s Incubation Program in June, came from NEO Global Capital, Arrington XRP Capital and Binance Labs itself.

Cere Network is building a blockchain platform that’s said to unlock customer data trapped within existing monolithic and disparate CRM/CDP systems. It does so by capturing customer transactions and interactions on a custom blockchain that provides an open microservices platform for secure data collaboration and integration among businesses.

User activity data is stored onto a secure and decentralized system integrated with Cere blockchain and designed to be easily accessed by businesses or vendors using permissioned proxy keys via Cere’s microservices platform. The platform can execute secure user data sharing and direct user acquisition between businesses and brands as well as provide collaboration potential and extensibility on top of sharable, encrypted customer datasets.

Cere Network says that its approach overcomes the issue where data is siloed and fragmented across multiple CRM systems.

“Today’s incumbents are not only expensive and inefficient, but it’s also difficult for businesses to extract clear customer insights across disparate CRM systems,” Fred Jin, co-founder and chief executive of Cere Network, said in a statement. “Our mission with Cere Network is to leverage blockchain to empower businesses to have control over their own data and unlock the potential of collaborative microservices on top of the unsiloed user data.”

Not surprisingly for a blockchain startup, Cere’s platform also offers tokens. They’re used by participants of its marketplace to provide and to pay for services within the ecosystem, as well as serve as an incentive for running blockchain network nodes and data nodes.

The potential is certainly there for Cere Network, but it’s entering an established market with a range of giant existing participants including IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., SAP AG, Saleforce.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.  The global market for CRM software is expected to grow to $35 billion by 2023 and has a compound annual growth rate of 6%, according to MarketrsMedia.

Image: Cere Network