The co-founders behind Centrifuge have previously created an essential company with Taulia. Now, they want to do it again, but on the blockchain.
Taulia is a supply-chain financing company. It has raised over $150 million and moves billions of dollars per day. 97 out of the Fortune 100 companies use it to improve liquidity when it comes to accounts payable.
Let’s say you’re a big industrial company and you have a client that represents 50 percent of your revenue. If you want to meet your client’s deadline and manufacture everything on time, you need to start producing right now.
But chances are this client is going to pay your invoice in 30 or 60 days. If you want to get the money now, you currently use Taulia to finance your production. Of course, you’ll end up paying interests, but you can buy supplies right now.
Centrifuge wants to take this one step further using blockchain technologies. The company plans to build an open-source protocol that uses the Ethereum blockchain as well as private sidechains, a marketplace of products and its own apps.
The company raised $3.8 million led by Mosaic Ventures and BlueYard Capital. “We anticipate to release the first version of the protocol in about four months,” co-founder Maex Ament told me.
Shortly after that, Centrifuge will release its first app based on its protocol. And the first one will be a decentralized funding marketplace. Companies can automatically push out their their unpaid invoices to Centrifuge. Banks or alternative lenders can provide liquidity to those companies using Centrifuge.
Building this on a blockchain makes a ton of sense because everybody can check transactions on a blockchain. It’s an open protocol with smart contracts to trigger transactions.
Eventually, you can imagine other services that leverage the Centrifuge graph. Companies could provide credit insurance, currency exchange and more on top of the Centrifuge protocol.
Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.