WINSTON-SALEM – Fluree, a three-year-old tech startup focusing on blockchain technology, is announcing Tuesday that it has landed $4.7 million in new financing, including funding from AOL Founder Steve Case’s Revolution Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

The deal is described by Fluree as the “largest tech infrastructure seed funding ever in North Carolina.” The money will be used to drive product awareness and adoption, Fluree says.

Also backing Fluree is 4490 Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in Madison, Wis.

The company is led by veteran tech entrepreneur Flip Filipowski, who is its cofounder and co-CEO along with Brian Platz.

With global tech giants such as IBM racing to embrace blockchain for a growing variety of initiatives, Fluree’s play is development of a database framework that it says enables greater integration of the technology.

FlureePBC, Winston-Salem’s blockchain database startup, launches FlureeDB

FlureeDB, its first product, can run internally as a highly-performant graph database to power standard business applications, and can also be distributed and decentralized—in its entirety—across an established network, or a permissioned blockchain. Permissioned blockchains provide entities in a consortium with a transparent ledger of transactions that is immutable by nature and decentralized with no central authority.

“Fluree’s technology simplifies for businesses the implementation process by using graph database technology to enable developers to quickly create powerful and secure applications while solving challenging data management problems like ‘race’ conditions, reproducible data state and, of course, scalability,” a spokesperson for Fluree says.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning adoption is helping drive demand for blockchain based solutions, Fluree says.

“Data is at the center of the new economy, yet it is managed by the same database approach we’ve had for 40 years,”Platz explains in a statement.

“We need to move beyond the application-centric mindset that has given rise to data silos and API bloat while increasing costs and obstacles to adopting new tech-like AI. A data-centric approach simultaneously saves money, promotes secure enterprise collaboration and provides additional leverage for information across systems.”