Author: Charlie Lougheed

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CLEVELAND, September 25, 2019 – Axuall, a next-generation digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time, announced today that it closed a $3 million seed financing round with leading strategic, angel, and venture capital investors.

Participating in the round are JumpStart (lead), Zapis Capital Group, M25, North Coast Angel Fund, Kettledrum Ventures, and Drummond Road Capital. This round of funding will be used to hire additional software engineering and product personnel, conduct several large scale pilots, develop the company’s partner network, and complete research and development for Axuall’s commercial release. Axuall is led by CEO Charlie Lougheed, an industry veteran who previously co-founded Explorys, a Cleveland-based healthcare big data and analytics company purchased by IBM in 2015.

“Axuall has been designed from the start to address a multibillion-dollar need to meet the demand for new delivery channels, products, and services in healthcare and other industries where proof matters,” stated Lougheed. “We chose healthcare as our first market because it faces considerable challenges related to increasing practitioner shortages, delivery channel expansion, and the growing demands of an aging population. Together, these challenges drive the urgency to reduce the administrative burden on its practitioners, reduce delays in hiring, accelerate revenue capture, and improve access to care.”

Axuall makes presenting professional credentials easy, safe, secure, and instantaneous. The technology enables healthcare providers to request and receive digitally signed credentials from primary sources that they can securely share with employers, health systems, and insurance plans. The Axuall network proactively monitors conditional events, such as expirations and dependencies, allowing practitioners to address issues the moment they arise. This means credentials will always be up-to-date, ready to present, and aligned with standards. This eliminates the need for health systems to request redundant information, dramatically shortening the time it takes to hire, privilege, enroll, and activate practitioners.

“We expect the need to verify facts quickly and efficiently to increase as organizations grow their offerings and expand their workforce,” said Rem Harris, JumpStart’s senior partner in charge of investing. “Axuall’s development of a realtime network and marketplace for verified facts will provide much-needed capabilities to the market.”

In August, Axuall was unanimously approved as a Sovrin Steward by the Sovrin Foundation Board of Trustees. Based on a public permissioned blockchain model, the Sovrin Network ledger is operated by a select community of Stewards that includes thought leaders from across software, financial services, telecommunications, non-profit, and law.

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About Axuall, Inc.

Axuall is a digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time. We address a multibillion-dollar need to eliminate waste, prevent fraud, manage risk, and meet the demand for next-generation products and services in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, government, and other industries where proof matters.

For more information, contact Jeffrey Stern | info@axuall.com

About JumpStart, Inc.

JumpStart is a nationally recognized investing, entrepreneurial support and economic development organization dedicated to unlocking the full potential of diverse and ambitious entrepreneurs to economically transform entire communities.

Axuall, a next-generation digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time, announced today that it has been unanimously approved as a Sovrin Steward by the Sovrin Foundation Board of Trustees.

Based on a public permissioned blockchain model, the Sovrin Network ledger is operated by Stewards, trusted organizations within the ecosystem who have agreed to abide by the requirements in the Sovrin Governance Frameworkand are responsible for operating the nodes that maintain the Sovrin distributed ledger. The community of Stewardsincludes thought leaders from across software, financial services, telecommunications, non-profit, and law.

Axuall will utilize Sovrin’s identity metasystem to cryptographically tie digital signatures to verifying entities, such as license boards and medical schools, to prove the authenticity of credential claims of medical practitioners and care organizations.

“The cumbersome process of acquiring verification of business assertions such as professional credentials, beneficiary eligibility, and supply chain data can no longer meet the demand for efficiency, privacy, or safety. This problem represents a multi-billion-dollar problem for healthcare, financial services, transportation, government, social services, and security organizations as they expand their delivery channels and serve larger customer bases”, stated Charlie Lougheed, Axuall’s CEO. “Our goal is to enable a safer, more efficient, and faster way of verifying critical assertions”.

With its first beta release scheduled for later this year, Axuall will provide a streamlined, auditable, and tamper-proof cloud service for sharing critical facts, such as identity and credentials, that have been digitally verified and signed by authorized third parties, compliant with the highest standards of authenticity. This will be a global network linking credential holders, verifiers, and subscribers enabling self-sovereign, portable, and real-time sharing of digital credentials across the expanding marketplace and digital economy.

“The Sovrin Foundation is excited to welcome Axuall as a Steward of the Sovrin Network,” says Heather C. Dahl, CEO & Executive Director of the Sovrin Foundation. “We look forward to supporting Axuall as it brings self-sovereign identity to the healthcare industry, allowing for the easy and secure exchange of digital credentials between healthcare professionals and institutions.”

Axuall’s initial go-to-market strategy will focus on professional credential data solutions, addressing the needs of healthcare systems in the U.S., as well as large health insurers in their markets. Later modules are expected to address the financial services, transportation, government, social services, and security sectors.

“We believe health care practitioners should be empowered to control their information and credentials. In essence, we are creating a digitally verifiable resume to decrease the friction faced by both employees and employers in the management of credentials,” stated Lucky Tavag, Axuall’s VP of Engineering. “By anchoring trust against a well-established distributed ledger, we are ensuring the authenticity of the issued credentials. Furthermore, using the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard creates room for a vibrant and interoperable ecosystem for credential exchange.”

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About Axuall, Inc.

Axuall is a digital network for verifying identity, credentials, and authenticity in real-time. We address a multibillion-dollar need to eliminate waste, prevent fraud, manage risk, and meet the demand for next-generation products and services in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, government, and other industries where proof matters.

For more information, contact: Jeffrey Stern | jeffrey.stern@axuall.com

About the Sovrin Foundation

The Sovrin Foundation is a nonprofit organization established to administer the Governance Framework governing the Sovrin Network, a decentralized global public network enabling self-sovereign identity on the internet. The Sovrin Network is an open-source project operated by independent Stewards and uses the power of a distributed ledger to give every person, organization, and thing the ability to own and control their own permanent digital identity.