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.
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