Cere Network Raises $1.5M More to Bring Its 'Decentralized Salesforce' to Polkadot

Binance-backed Cere Network has raised another $1.5 million to become a decentralized version of Salesforce.

The firm will build its customer relationship management (CRM) tools on the Polkadot network, according to a Wednesday announcement. Cere’s latest raise follows a $3.5 million seed round announced in August 2019.

Arrington XRP Capital, QCP Capital, Kinetic Capital, Monday Capital and AU21 Capital led the round, all of which participated in the last round.

Cere has allocated the funds for its enterprise-grade Decentralized Data Cloud (DDC) platform pitched as an alternative to mainstream alternatives. The product will be available to all other applications built on Polkadot, the firm said.

“For years, the same major tech companies – including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce – have been holding consumer data hostage,” Cere CEO Fred Jin said in a statement. “The Cere DDC platform gives businesses back ownership of their data and allows them to quickly build up their own customer data ecosystems.” 

Described as a “protocol for protocols,” Polkadot enables developers and projects to launch their own blockchains in a similar manner to how Ethereum enables users to issue their own tokens.

“We are excited to see Cere innovating along the same vision of interoperable ecosystems to foster the next generation of DeFi and blockchain adoption,” Dieter Fishbein, head of ecosystem development at Polkadot builder Web3 Foundation, said in a statement.

Polkadot is generally seen as a competitor to Ethereum and other blockchains built for decentralized applications (dapps). As of now, the general competition has mainly consisted of dapps hopping between different Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)–compatible blockchains, such as Compound Finance announcing plans to launch its own Compound Chain.

Correction (14:23 UTC, Dec. 23 2020): The amount raised was $1.5 million, not $1.25 million, as was initially reported.