Factom, Inc., an Austin-based blockchain technology company, has announced that it has $4.2 million Series A round of equity funding led by Tim Draper of Draper Associates.

Speaking with CoinDesk, Factom co-founder and CEO Peter Kirby said the funds will be used to further develop its core technology and suite of products. Over the forthcoming months, the company also plans to scale with a series of hires.

“We are delighted to have venture capitalists of such calibre help us build Factom,” Kirby said. "This round of funding allows us to aggressively grow the company and the underlying technology. We started Factom to build a more honest and transparent world using a pretty simple approach: create software that makes it impossible to change the past and point that software at places where it solves valuable business problems. This funding accelerates our progress down that road."

Blockchain technology investment and development company Coinsilium, which has a 1.8% equity interest in Factom, welcomed the news.

“When we increased our investment in Factom earlier this year, having previously introduced additional investors, Factom’s CEO Peter Kirby declared that we were the first investor who ‘really got Factom’. With this in mind we are delighted to see that there is an increasing number of likeminded investors and that they have decided to partake in this Series A funding round”, Eddy Travia, CEO of Coinsilium, stated. “We have continued to be impressed by the pace at which Peter and his team have worked this year to build partnerships and solutions. These have each put Factom on the map as one of the leading blockchain and data security companies.”

Founded in 1985, Draper Associates is a seed-stage venture capital firm that encourages entrepreneurs to drive their businesses to greatness, to transform industries with new technologies, and to build platforms for extraordinary growth, jobs, and wealth creation.

“By decentralizing data through the blockchain, Factom avoids critical failures due to user error or hacker. Factom lets people sleep easy knowing that their bank account won’t be broken into, their car won’t errantly go off the road, and their identity won’t be stolen”, Tim Draper stated.

Factom Apollo and Factom Iris premium products are built on Factom’s open source core software and represent an innovative, lightweight, and scalable approach using the blockchain to secure records and identity. The company says that this is more secure than any other solution on the market.

Earlier in June, Factom received $199,000 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to advance the security of digital identity for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.