General Motors puts its money behind blockchain startup

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Blockchain startup Spring Labs has wrapped up its Seed A funding round, attracting $23 million in the process. The company is working on its Spring Protocol and creating new fraud protection products for the auto financing sector and one of its backers is confident that it can make a difference. According to a press release, General Motors, through its General Motors Ventures investment arm, is putting its weight and money behind the company.

The new products being developed by Spring Labs include Spring Verify, Spring Protect and Spring Defense. They are being created to facilitate and secure identity verification, loan stacking prevention and fraud monitoring and mitigation, respectively. All three are able to anonymously deliver information to lenders in order to provide stronger support for unsecured consumer lending, the issuance of credit cards, secured auto lending and small business lending. The products under development are expected to help enhance customer on-boarding processes through cost reductions and improved data security and availability.

The funding round was led by GreatPoint Ventures and included additional capital from existing investors, of which GM is a part. Additionally, August Capital, RRE Ventures, Multicoin Capital, CardWorks, Galaxy Digital and The Pritzker Group chipped in.

Spring Labs co-founder and CEO Adam Jiwan asserts, “We’re pleased to announce our Series A with strong participation from existing and new strategic investors, enabling us to accelerate the development of new products as well as the Spring Protocol itself. Additionally, we’re excited to expand our relationship with GM Financial, which has demonstrated its commitment to innovation and collaboration over the past year, playing an active role in the evaluation of products and use cases on the Spring Protocol.”

Mike Kanario, GM Financial’s chief strategy officer, adds, “GM financial is excited to deepen its relationship with Spring Labs, and we look forward to the launch of the Spring products as we believe they have the potential to better protect our customers from fraudulent activity.”

General Motors joined the Spring Founding Industry Partners (SPIF) Program this past February. The program is designed to provide better security solutions for the automotive industry using research and collaboration.