Yesterday, Belgian blockchain startup Settlemint announced a €16 million ($16 million) Series A funding round led by UK-based Molten Ventures and Netherlands-based OTB Ventures. Other new sponsors include Fujitsu Ventures, Allusion and Bloccelerate, along with investor Medici Ventures.

The startup is a low-code middleware company that makes it easy and fast for businesses to develop blockchain solutions on a variety of blockchain technologies. It has solutions across various industries, including NFTs, banking, supply chain, and energy.

“When we launched SettleMint in 2016, we saw the benefits companies would gain from integrating blockchain applications into their existing systems, but we also knew there was no easy way for developers to do it,” said Matthew Van Niekerk, co-founder and director of SettleMint. CEO.

“As professionals, we also recognized the repeated and predictable challenges that every blockchain implementation faces and that enterprise-grade implementations have very high requirements for security, scalability, and interoperability.”

The funds will be used to expand its existing presence in Belgium, Dubai, Delhi and Singapore and establish a new office in Japan with the help of Fujitsu. While Fujitsu is now an investor, the startup has been working with the Japanese firm for years as a channel partner.

For example, a product transparency test conducted by brewing giant AB InBev in 2020 involved Settlemint along with Fujitsu. The Japanese tech giant is no slouch when it comes to blockchain as one of the founders of the Hyperledger Cacti interoperability protocol.

Both Bloccelerate and Medici Ventures have experience in blockchain-focused corporate venture investments. For example, Medici backs Bitt, CBDC development firm Medici Land Governance, and security token firm tZero, which recently attracted investment from NYSE owner ICE.

“While there is a massive demand to implement blockchain solutions and applications, there is an equivalent shortage of blockchain expertise,” said Vinoth Jayakumar, partner at Molten Ventures. “SettleMint bridges that gap by allowing developers to build web3 products and focus on the business use cases of the end product, not the complex underlying blockchain infrastructure.”

Settlemint used to label itself an enterprise blockchain company, although it has supported public and private blockchains since the early days. What it really means is that it focuses on business use cases. Permissioned blockchains supported by Settlemint include Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu, and R3’s Corda. And public blockchains include Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain.

Each blockchain middleware company has a very different offering. But in that group we would include Kaleido, SIMBA Chain and Finboot. The DAML smart contract language also supports multiple blockchain technologies.