Former JPMorgan blockchain lead Amber Baldet unveiled her new startup project, Clovyr, at the Consensus conference in New York on Monday.
Baldet left her position at JPMorgan in April to work on Clovyr. She led JPMorgan Blockchain Center of Excellence and helped the firm succeed with open-source initiatives, such as Quorum. In a strange juxtaposition, her successful tenure at JPMorgan coincided with CEO Jamie Dimon’s bitcoin bashing.
Clovyr is composed of a suite of tools for blockchain applications and services for development teams to deploy products to the cloud or on-site production environments.
Built around an ecosystem philosophy, Clovyr touts a GUI dashboard for users to interact with its product suite. As a means of avoiding vendor lock-in, the company also touts flexibility with hosting, whether that’s staying with Clovyr or using public or private cloud deployments.
Baldet hopes to capitalize on increased enterprise-level interest in blockchain applications with her new startup. At the same time, she admits that enterprises’ concerns are valid and that blockchain is not “some privacy panacea”, she wrote in a tweet on April 23.
The suite that Clovyr provides seeks to assuage fears with tools that lower the barrier to entry for development teams. The service relies heavily on open-source tools built for the Ethereum blockchain, such as Parity and Geth.
In an interview with Fortune, she compared enterprise’s reluctance toward blockchain technology to the private vs. public cloud debate.
“When public cloud started to be a thing, a lot of businesses said, Oh, cloud, it’s a great idea architecturally, but we’re going to go ahead and build our own private cloud internally because it’s safer and we know what we need”, Baldet says. “Now they’re spending millions of dollars to undo a lot of that work in an attempt to migrate to the public clouds that have evolved to the point where they are secure and robust and connected.”
With extensive experience in JPMorgan and the traditional finance sector overall, Baldet has expert knowledge for opening up the blockchain for enterprise.
AlongsidecCo-founder and CTO Patrick Nielson, also a former J.P. Morgan engineer, Baldet is seeking to grow the team.
Baldet’s Twitter account has an impressive following of over 37k. She has become a leader for diversity in blockchain technology, and her startup continues this tradition.
As CCN reported, the gender gap has drawn criticism, as women represent between only 4% and 6% of blockchain investors. She is a firm believer that a diverse range of perspectives serves to improve blockchain applications. She has spoken at SXSW, the MIT Media lab, and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
