Taiwanese Startup ITM Secures Pre-Series A Funding From MediaTek

The award-winning blockchain scaling solution and IC enabler, International Trust Machines Corporation (ITM), revealed today that it held a pre-Series A round of funding from the leading integrated circuits company MediaTek.

With the help of MediaTek’s investment, the Taiwanese ITM expects to receive wider global recognition. Established in 2019, the startup is known for its productive and reasonably-priced blockchain SDK, which is secured with a fingerprint on blockchain and can be ported on IoT chips seamlessly.

ITM’s CEO and co-founder, Julian Chen shared the company’s plans:

“With MediaTek’s funding, we are planning to take our brand to the global stage due to the rising overseas interest in our solutions. Since we only set up a year ago, most of our on-going projects are domestic. With the surge of demand for our products among the global partners, we are planning to expand our business overseas and hopefully establish more strategic partnerships to allow more people to benefit from our product.”

Another goal for ITM is to invest the funding in product development targeting B2B users as part of the creation of the next generation of ITM’s SDK.

According to the startup, the next version of the SDK will be adopted more easily in-between apps, will be able to cope with a larger amount of data input and will offer more flexible options such as a pay-as-you-go. On the technical side, it will feature a new multi-blockchain engine, which could be integrated with other blockchain solutions like R3 Corda and Hyperledger.

Chen elaborated on ITM’s perks:

“Applying blockchain to large amount IoT is impossible unless one can solve scalability issues without compromising security. This is what ITM can offer and we have already built our solution on MediaTek’s MT3620 which runs Microsoft Azure Sphere OS. With Azure Sphere certified MT3620 and Microsoft Azure cloud service, we are able to find the missing puzzles for cloud-to-edge security and enhance ITM’s solution for IoT.”

ITM has already won a number of innovation and industry-specific awards such as Qualcomm Innovate in Taiwan Challenge 2019 and Meet Taipei 2019. In addition, a project, in which ITM participates has been selected for the biggest wireless communication exhibition – the 2020 Global Mobile Awards at MWC.

Although the sum which MediaTek has invested is not public, we can see that companies from an increasing number of industries fund blockchain startups and this will surely boost the expansion of blockchain and IoT.