Crypto startup OBM plans to put $3M Series A toward hiring, growing platform

Baltimore-based OBM Inc. has some major plans for the closed $3 million Series A it recently announced.

The cryptocurrency-focused company plans to use the funds, which came entirely from Bitcoin-focused investment and infrastructure development entity NYDIG, to build a full-fledged development team. That team would support the building of software that crypto miners use to better manage the power consumption of their hundreds of devices that process transactions on the blockchain.

OBM has already used the funds to hire a developer to help build out its extant crypto-mining management platform, Foreman. The software allows Bitcoin miners to manage their farming PCs remotely, instead of driving an hour (for reference: that’s roughly the drive from Westminster from Baltimore) to reset mining computers manually — which OBM’s CEO Daniel Lawrence and CTO Jacob Luers did before founding the company.

“We use to be very focused on the miner on the shelf, that computer sitting there generating bitcoin all day,” Lawrence told Technical.ly. “We’re quickly realizing that running these mines [is] a lot more about what’s around the miner.”

Lawrence and Luers seek to cater to the future of enterprise bitcoin mining. That term refers to mines that have hundreds of PCs and more infrastructure closer to a data server than, for instance, a few Raspberry Pi-type devices in the basement. Power consumption, energy efficiency and data-cooling system maintenance are all factors for which bitcoin miners working at scale need to account. OBM is also creating a SAS tool to monitor all that.

The founders intend to hire eight more crypto-interested developers to expand what the platform can do. The company has also signed a lease in Highlandtown and expects all the new hires to be either locally-based or willing to relocate to the area.

“We want to feel like we’re all one team and that there’s a lot of harmony between all of us,” Lawrence said. “That’s why we’re really focused on hiring locally first: to get a good foundation underneath ourselves and then, maybe in the future, we’d consider more remote.