Blockchain wallet and identity startup Netki has announced that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding round led by O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV).

The funding round also drew support from Donuts, Colle Capital, Husseini Group, Digital Currency Group, Tom Turney, Bitfinex, Plug and Play.

"We plan to use the funds to invest in our technology and grow our team in order to support customer growth," Justin Newton, CEO of Netki told thecoindesk.com.

This is the first investment for O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures in the blockchain industry, unlike all other investors that are already actively involved in this space.

“OATV and its affiliate O’Reilly Media have deeply respected roots in the open source developer community. They understand the value of creating standards early on that can be built upon to enable widespread, rapid growth of a nascent technology. We are thrilled that Netki is OATV’s first investment in the blockchain space,” Newton said, as reported by IBT.

Earlier in 2015, Netki introduced a bitcoin wallet naming solution ‘Wallet Name Service’ which is used to assign human readable names to IP addresses, making it easy to write and remember. Companies like Purse, BitSo, Bitt and BlockCypher integrated Netki’s wallet naming service. 

Netki recently announced during CoinDesk's Consensus 2016 that it will soon launch identity certificate product that is compared to an SSL Certificate for the blockchain which will verify the identity of the person before performing transactions. The company plans to implement identity certificate service by the end of 2016.