Starfleet 4 — The 7 teams we selected for phase 2
Take a look at all the startups who made it through the Genesis Week — a 7-day boot camp, at Starfleet India
After several months of preparation and coordination, our team took off ✈ ️to Bangalore, India to conduct the Genesis Week — one week-long, super-intense boot camp of Starfleet Vol. 4. We started on Monday, March 2 and finished on March 8.
We worked together with IBC Media’s team to create an all-encompassing learning experience for the startups. We delivered a great mentor line-up with experts from all over India including in-house experts from æternity. The startups had a very exhaustive program saturated with top-level lectures and workshops, where the startups had the opportunity to look at their projects from all angles and develop a holistic overview of their value propositions, product development, and presentations.
We have to mention that all 13 startups shortlisted from a pool of 170+ applications, did display huge potential. It was a hard choice, but after the Selection day which was yesterday, we are ready to share with you the 7 teams which will continue the Starfleet program with 4 more weeks of mentoring.
SO here are our winners:
1. Drife
Set to disrupt the ride-hailing industry, Drife is a building the taxi 3.0 with blockchain technology. Their value proposition lies in empowering value creators like drivers, commuters, and community developers. They are reimagining existing business models and are eliminating dependencies on corporate intermediaries involved in the transactions. Drife will build a platform that will not charge a commission from the drivers signed on to the platform, gives the rider and the driver the option of choosing who they drive, the market trends will dictate the price and there won’t be a concept of surge price.
They’ve entered the ride-hailing services market that was valued at USD 34.45 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 126,521.2 million by 2025. However, the reason Drife exists is not limited to the budding market. They decided to create this solution because they saw the problems faced by both those who hail rides and the drivers.
Their solution is set apart from others in the ride-hailing industry by providing transparency in fare computation, price determination and commission-less payment transfers, incentivized network-building rating, feedback and conflict resolution, and subscription plans for the drivers. Presently, these are the features that are missing from most service providers in this industry.
Drife is led by Firdosh Sheikh — CEO and Co-founder and Surya Ranjith — CFO & Co-founder and is backed up by a four-member team.
2. Hypersign
Hypersign is a decentralized identity management solution built by Hypermine Labs. They are working towards giving people the power to login to their online accounts with one holistic solution. Hypersign will reduce our dependencies on platforms like Google, Facebook, etc. when managing our passwords.
However, the Hypersign story is rooted in a conversation between Vishwas and Vikram (co-founders) about simplifying the process of entering passwords and securing them to avoid any breaches. They identified that Hypersign can potentially reduce support desk costs by 30%. To put that into perspective, companies that provide customer services with help desks face password resets on a regular basis and it costs around $70 to manage a single password reset call. Additionally, 33% of online purchases are abandoned due to lost or forgotten passwords. A solution like Hypersign can help reduce this number and promote sales.
Presently, the Identity And Access Management market is projected to be worth $20 Billion by 2025. Hypersign is aiming to grab this market by providing a one-stop solution to the identity problem.
Hypersign is a unique solution for the industry and is different from most of its competitors. The login workflow is built to be user-friendly and human-centric, not limiting its user experience to developers. The platform also enables applications that don’t trust each other to identify the same user, without relying on an intermediary, in a manner entirely controlled by the user themselves. Moreover, this solution can be applied to online media streaming services like Netflix, can be used to access blockchains, create secure storage, and can be applied to single-sign-on (SSOs).
Hypermine Labs is a seven-member team that is working to build smart tools and protocols for Identity & Security using blockchain technology in its mix.
3. Pontis
Pontis is a startup that is aiming at bringing the power of DeFi (decentralized banking) to the masses. Pontis is a solution for centralized exchanges built by a two-member team based out of Bangalore, Karnataka.
The value proposition of Pontis lies in its ability to aggregate the best tools in DeFi and integrate them with the exchanges, providing a single gateway for engaging with all of them, comparing their rates and switching between them. This is built as a cross-platform plug-n-play model that is a B2B product for enterprises.
Presently, centralized exchanges do not dabble in DeFi as they face revenue loss due to customer churn. As a result of this, centralized exchanges have lost up to 6.5% holdings in the past year. Moreover, there’s an overall issue with the customer experience as there are over $15 bln idle customer assets.
Pontis plans to change this with their SaaS B2B solution. Users of centralized exchanges can leverage Pontis to integrate their individual wallets seamlessly with DeFi dApps and explore, transact and leverage the offerings of DeFi. Pontis intends to maintain the same branding and other UX elements as that of the exchanges for consistent and seamless user experience. All the cryptocurrency staked using Pontis is held in smart contracts owned by the exchange (or Pontis), depending on the contract terms. Pontis plans to build the necessary backend, smart contracts and other on-chain elements that bring the two worlds together.
Pontis is led by Co-founders Nitin Goyal and Hemanth Kumar, who are building this solution based on years of experience working in the IT sector.
4. Murmur
Murmur is a decentralized social media platform solving for fake news, data privacy, and censorship resistance in existing social networks. This team of eight people, led by CEO — Abhinav Ramesh has stepped into the social media industry to build a new paradigm for sharing, creating and consuming content.
There is a growing need for validated, verified news on social media. Given how paid advertising and sponsored content on social media leads to the circulation of untruthful news. Presently, Facebook has allocated $14 m to filter out fake news from its users’ newsfeed.
In response to this development in the social media realm, Murmur is creating a solution that enables authentic and vetted content and no fake news, community-driven censorship instead of centralized governance, and ensuring user data is kept with the users alone.
Murmur’s AI + governance framework for fake news makes it the place to verify the news. It has a reputation system that helps establish a “trust score” for pseudonymous accounts online — both these features enable Murmur to integrate with any site online to showcase a “Trust Score”. It also encourages users to share this “Trust Score” based Murmurs (like Tweets) onto other social networks. This makes Murmur the most “Trusted” social network, and blockchain technology provides transparency in the system.
Murmur has over 10,000 users and over 1 million transactions have been made on their smart contracts.
5. QuillTrace
QuillTrace is a blockchain-technology based SaaS platform for supply chain management that solves traceability, trust, and transparency. They are solving challenges with respect to the identification of supply chain frauds, ensuring an ethical and sustainable supply chain that eliminates middlemen while creating new business opportunities.
They are targetting the global SaaS-based supply chain management industry that was valued at $2.9 bln in 2016, expected to reach $9.4 bln by 2023, with a CAGR of 18.6%.
QuillTrace provides solutions with respect to provenance in the supply chains. This will enable the stakeholder to track assets with transparent supply chains. The customers are given to track and trace the product's origin. The accountability in executing supply chain processes is secured with smart contracts, automating the product process, transactions, and ownership of the asset.
QuillTrace can be applied across several industry verticals and can adapt to existing ERP & IT systems as well as blockchain protocols.
QuillTrace is a three-member team led by Co-founders Preetham Rao, Rajat Gahlot, and Sahithya Kumar as the CTO.
6. GoFinito
By identifying the need to provide retailers with smart solutions and streamline retail experiences for shoppers, GoFintio has embarked on creating a simple yet sophisticated solution that removes the inconvenience of standing in queues and helping retailers build universal loyalty programs for all brands.
The current retail industry has $22.1 bln in global retail loss due to queues at billing desks & inefficient loyalty programs. In a densely populated country like India with a large number of people shopping in offline retail stores, GoFinito’s solution aims to change this experience with efficiency and data intelligence.
GoFinito’s retail SAAS platform will facilitate fast retail checkouts, increase user engagement with a universal loyalty program for cross-industry offline store partners. They will help retailers optimize their store presence and customer experience, reduce CapEx & OpEx while eliminating the need to set up billing kiosks and utilize the idle floor staff in a more efficient way with the Staff Mobile POS.
This solution was conceptualized by Rishav Bajoria — Co-Founder & CEO of GoFinito when he was standing in line at a supermarket with his brother. He along with Abhishek Sharma — Co-founder and CTO of GoFinito, is leading a team of six to build this solution.
7. ESGRobo
ESGRobo is a startup that is working towards providing solutions in the realm of corporate sustainability. They are building a solution that aims to improve sustainability in the fashion industry’s supply chain. With ESGRobo’s product, manufacturers in the fashion industry can materialize accountability for providing optimal environmental conditions for workers and laborers, as well as optimize operating conditions to improve the efficiency of underlying processes.
The $2 trillion fashion industry that creates over 40 million jobs might be a booming space that startups can capitalize on. However, it has a dark side that is concerned with ethical issues. ESGRobo is focused on changing this by creating a product that will enable accountability. They recognized that the apparel manufacturing sector is one of the largest employers globally but lags behind in terms of modernization and human rights compliance. Their innovative (patent-filed) technology helps all stakeholders in this realm remove inefficiencies and gain unprecedented visibility deep inside the multi-layers of the global supply chain.
The ESG Robo is led by Sandeep Raghuwanshi who was motivated to fix this problem in the fashion industry.
Gotta love these movers and shakers!
We’re moving forward with Starfleet India by pushing these startups into the next phase which will involve mentoring and advisory. Here the startups will develop their products, teams, and business strategies. We’re excited to continue to evangelize entrepreneurship and the creation of products that can make a difference in the world with the æternity blockchain. Stay tuned with us and we will keep you posted with more updates.
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