BLOCKROCKET’s Monthly Pitch Competition (June 2020)
Every month, we handpick a few promising early-stage blockchain startups to pitch their business case in front of 150+ leading executives, founders, and investors from the blockchain ecosystem in Germany. This time, we also included a small jury of business angels and VCs to our events, who would lead the Q&A session with each startup and vote (together with the audience) for their monthly favorite.
Five startups had the opportunity to pitch their idea in 5 minutes, with a subsequent Q&A session in front of the jury and the audience. You can revisit our pitch event online.
Startup of the month: License.rocks
After 60 min of an exciting and qualitatively valuable event and after a close decision by the jury and the audience, Daud Zulfacar and License.Rocks were voted for as the “Startup of the Month”.
About License.Rocks
License.Rocks develops a blockchain-based solution for managing a secure trading of software usage rights (“licenses”). The goal is to establish a standardized license token to simplify the compliance with license rights and to advance the automation of new licensing models. A new kind of transparency and trust is generated through the consistent digitalization of contract information in a machine-readable and a tamper-proof storage of ownership.
The democratization of knowledge that has emerged through the Internet has led to a progressive and unstoppable decentralization and specialization of various work steps. In order to cope with the resulting complexity and dynamics, decentralized and automated process control is essential. License.Rocks is convinced that decentralized technologies are ideally suited to map the license management systems of the future. With their help we can create the missing building blocks for the secure transfer of values and additionally enable the protection of individual digital products.
We are aware of the current state of the technology, which is why we have reduced its use to an acceptable minimum in order not to create unnecessary barriers to entry. For this reason, the trade with software licenses on the second-hand market (“secondary sale”) was validated and implemented as the first use case, since the requirements for license transfer could be ideally mapped with a blockchain-based solution.
The two founders have been working together for 13 years and have previously built up a start-up in the software and license management market as early employees. They headed the product and services division and became a successful medium-sized company. Together they have more than three decades of experience in various management positions in the IT sector.
The team is supported by four developers and two designers, spread over three countries.
How did the Corona crises affect the development of License.Rocks?
Corona hit us pretty hard as we lost one of our launch partners as a potential investment partner, as they had plans to invest in us. We had to rethink our Go-to-Market approach and needed to come up with new solutions quickly. The benefits of being a startup is that that one needs to be agile and that helps a lot in such situations. So we decided to switch more to an end-to-end market approach, instead of starting a reseller model - now we are focusing more on Oracle and insolvency managers. We assume that due to the crisis we will have tons of insolvencies that will bring liquidity to the used software license market again in the next few months.
What are your plans for License.Rocks in 2020?
Our solution will shift more towards the decentralized space, since we keep reevaluating the customer / technology UX fit to see how much decentralization works for our customer base.
We will create our first two folded token model, so that any creator also can click their license tokens together without touching anything else than the interface we provide to do so if they have our token.
The first end-to-end market solution for used software will launch with ProLicense and adapt to the need of the insolvency managers solution.
We will expand on the possibilities of licensed items to go beyond used software use cases and have first paid PoCs or potential customers with domain expertise.
This year we will come up with our open source contributions to ease the process of using our solution by other creators that want to build any licensing option for their digital or later connected devices. We like to find the first right partners to try out new license models leveraging on their domain expertise to come up with industry specific licensing solutions.
We are going to leverage the ERC1155 token and also explore permanent storage options as arweave. Various use cases will be implemented with a flexible workflow builder that can create any metadata based on further standards for digitized products. Like that we start building a developer community.
Where do you hope to see Licence.Rocks in 5 or 10 years?
We want to build a token economy around the topic of licensing. If anyone thinks of licensing, our solution should be a valid option. We don’t want to solve all use cases, we also don’t want to be the operators of all these various uses cases, but rather the licensing infrastructure that enables other developers to build their customized use cases, by using our platform.
We believe in the composability and modular architectures of software solutions, as of the existence of multiple chains for various use cases. We like to be part of covering various license use cases onboarding developers, license and legal experts, relevant oracle providers, state of art technologies and sales and marketing supporting players as well as solutions.
Ideally we want to create new licensing use cases for the untapped world of the traditional licensing market, expanding in all kind of directions as new digital items, smart devices driven by feature-based licensing and physical products being tokenized to offer new opportunities for customer monetization and engagement.
Startups that pitched their idea
Our monthly pitch event was a great success, we wish License.Rocks and the other startups who were part of the event all the best for the following months and look forward to our next event in July!
- Finery Tech — Investech and research firm (Ilia Drozdov)
- Trality — Platform for algorithmic crypto trading (Moritz Putzhammer)
- ditCraft — Software-testing-as-a-Service provider (Marvin Kruse)
- License.Rocks — Licensing platform (Daud Zulfacar)
- Smartcredit.io — Peer-to-Peer Lending Platform (Martin Ploom)
Jury
- Olaf Hannemann, Co-Founder, CV VC
- Nicolas Priem, Managing Director, Tioga Capital Partners
- Thaddäus Clauss, Investment Manager, JC Investments
About Blockrocket
BLOCKROCKET is an early-stage investor and accelerator program for blockchain startups in Germany. We offer an exclusive ecosystem to help startups, corporates, and investors to leverage the potential of blockchain technology in Germany. Want to find out more about our program? Then please visit our website or reach out directly to us: www.blockrocket.io
