It’s an exciting day for Vendia – we’re pleased to announce a $15.5M Series A investment, the launch of our Developer Preview for Vendia Share, and share some of our customers’ use cases!

We launched Vendia last year with a simple goal in mind: Help businesses and organizations of all sizes create applications that span real-world divides. Gone are the days when an application and its data was the province of a single company, operating in isolation. Today’s apps span geographies, accounts, departments, clouds, and even legal owners. From supply chains to logistics to financial settlement, tracking goods and transactions has become a team sport.

Meanwhile, data is not just everywhere…there’s more of it! IoT, Mobile, Edge, digital transformations by companies all over the world – all of these are resulting in more data being created in more places. Meanwhile, data consumption has become the new battleground, where staying competitive hinges on having correct, consistent, and up-to-date information about customers, inventory, logistics, and more. Now add partners and their own data creation mechanisms and data silos to this mix, and having an end-to-end view of data can feel like an impossibility.

Building and operating scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure that can tackle the heavy lift of keeping data and the code that operates on it synchronized across clouds, companies, regions, accounts, and technology stacks is challenging, even for well staffed IT organizations. Developers need a reliable, resilient, and scalable data integration platform, and most companies don’t have the time or resources to DIY it from the ground up.

Enter Vendia Share – a simple, schema-driven platform that enables developers to access cloud-native experiences without resorting to the “lowest common denominator” of porting container software. We built Vendia Share to handle the challenges of replicating and synchronizing data and code (modern day “stored procedures”) so that application developers can focus on their business logic, rather than how to create a distributed data storage and execution layer.

Our Customers

Customers are already creating sophisticated business solutions using Vendia Share. Food wholesalers work with a number of partners who have varying degrees of IT capabilities. For some partners – such as logistics companies, food producers, and warehouses – cell phones may function as their entire IT department. This customer needed to reduce the time spent resolving Three-Way Matches – a process that compares the purchase order, the goods receipt note, and the supplier’s invoice before approving a supplier’s invoice for payment. It helps in determining whether the invoice should be paid partly or in its entirety.

Before Vendia, this company manualy reconciled receipts via Excel spreadsheets, phone calls, expensive procurement solutions and in some case through point-to-point API calls. The result? An error rate in excess of 60%, arbitration sought by partners in over 45% of exceptions, and a general distrust in the underlying data that precluded monetization and optimization opportunities.

With Vendia, the company was able to create a simple mobile and web application that captures data from partners. Vendia Share ensures that all parties involved in a transaction see the same version of the data – a single source of truth. In addition, when a delivery meets its SLA (on time, delivered in full, and at an appropriate temperature), the application is now able to immediately and automatically pay the partner with no human intervention and no errors.

Best Friends Animal Society is another Vendia customer with a particularly poignant challenge: Returning lost pets that wind up in shelters to their owners. Here, a failure to share data isn’t just wasted time and money…it can literally end an animal’s life. By enabling easy sharing of animal information across shelters, lost pet websites, veterinarians, animal safety workers, and pet owners, Vendia Share enables Best Friends to help ensure that all pets get home safely.

Angie Embree, CIO, Best Friends Animal Society says: “Ending the killing in US animal shelters by the end of 2025 is our goal at Best Friends Animal Society and we deliver lifesaving companion animal programs in partnership with more than 2,500 animal welfare groups across the country. We have helped reduce the number of dogs and cats killed in shelters nationwide from 17 million per year to under 650,000 and those last animals are the hardest. To effectively care for shelter pets and find them forever homes, the animal welfare community needs reliable, trustworthy, real time data. We love Vendia because not only it is simple to share data in an easy, scalable way without upfront investment but also because the animal welfare community can take advantage of cutting edge Serverless Distributed Ledger technology without having to learn new concepts. We are now able to build applications that return more lost pets to their families, know where shelters might euthanize for space and help them by moving those animals, and easily exchange data between systems as well as other apps on the Vendia platform.”

Welcome, Developers!

At Vendia we obsess about our customers and are excited by their successes. But our mission also extends to developers – we want to help them experience an easier way to build applications. Our background in selling public cloud services taught that there are two frequent roadblocks when trying to get developers to adopt managed services: Their proprietary nature and the lack of a common data model. These can create a “walled garden” that often drives companies and developers to adopt technologies that they admit are more complex and expensive, just to avoid the potential for lock-in or to overcome the real-world challenges of needing to create blended solutions that involve data and services from more than a single cloud service provider. We created Vendia Share to span clouds and to expose the best each cloud has to offer, rather than insist on “lowest common denominator porting”.

With Vendia Share’s Developer Preview, developers can try out our platform on AWS for free and experience its unique ability to help them create multi-region, multi-account, and multi-party applications from a data schema instead of through complex application code. We’ve built Vendia using a Serverless architecture, but we don’t require that developers share our opinion – the platform’s fault tolerance, scalability, and lack of infrastructure complexity is just as useful for developers who prefer containers, servers, or even API calls from an on-prem mainframe.

To get started, visit vendia.com/developers to learn more and register, or check out our welcome blog for developers.