Starfleet India — the 3 winning teams
The Demo Day of Starfleet India was entirely online because of COVID-19 and hosted 7 blockchain pitches and an impressive speakers’ lineup!
Despite the world’s lockdown and the increasing financial turbulence due to the pandemic, AE Ventures moved forward with the culmination of the Indian edition of its Global Acceleration Program Starfleet — the Demo Day.
For it to be safe for everyone and close to a real event, we organized it as a Virtual conference and a Demo Day — entirely online and with interesting guests. Along with the brilliant startup pitches we wanted to showcase insightful and relevant content for panel discussions and motivating and engaging keynotes. For this, together with our partners from IBC Media, we invited incredible speakers who are leading innovators across blockchain and start-up space including Hon’ble Smt Rama Devi Officer on Special Duty (OSD), ITE&C Department, Government of Telangana; Shradha Sharma, Chief Editor, and Founder, @YourStory, and Wei Zhou, Chief Financial Officer, Binance, to name a few.
Starfleet India — the story:
At the beginning of 2020, we have opened the application window for Indian blockchain startups and 13 blockchain startups were shortlisted from a staggering 176 applications received.
These teams were invited to take part in the 7 days long intense Bootcamp program called Genesis week. In the course of the program, the 13 startups went through numerous lectures, workshops, and exercises with leading industry experts from the region. At the end of the training, only 7 teams were selected to proceed to the second stage of the Starfleet accelerator — the mentoring program. This time the mentoring period was extended with about a month, during which the mentors from the AE Ventures team prepared the 7 startups for the big day — the Demo Day.
On 8 May 2020, with over 350 participants attending from across the globe, the startups were pitching LIVE on the virtual stage, exhibiting their projects, business models, and their disruptive approach. From the top 7 Blockchain projects the AE Ventures jury, together with the guest investors from CVLabs and Woodstock Fund announced the winners. Namely: Pontis, Hypermine, and Drife.
Here is a brief introduction to the 3 selected for investment and 6 more months of acceleration projects:
Pontis is a DeFi 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.
Hypermine is a Bangalore-based startup that provides a decentralized identity management solution enabled with a single-sign-on. In its essence, Hypermine uses the underlying protocol to validate a digital signature produced by a standard blockchain algorithm in a mobile device using authentication service which is a smart-contract deployed on a blockchain. It does not rely on a central authority; it, therefore, provides a completely decentralized environment for identity management.
Hypermine envisions a world where privacy is a fundamental right, where people are given true ownership of their data.
3. Drife
Set to disrupt the ride-hailing industry, Drife is building the taxi 3.0 with blockchain technology. Drife is a Bangalore-based startup, it aims at empowering both the driver and the rider’s community. Drife is developed with the intention of solving the current concerns in the drivers’ community, alongside enhancing the quality of rides for the customer.
This is a one-person-show that is enabled to disrupt the ride-hailing industry. The platform deals with a whole new economic model and will incentivize all the value creators equally. Drife in no way undermines the need to circumvent the obstacles of a bureaucratic world; however, in its own way, this app creates an organic system for the ride-hailing industry to thrive well on the internet.
Congrats! 🎉 We are glad to welcome them to the æternity ecosystem.
Starfleet India has been an incredible adventure not only for the startups participating in it but for our team as well. We are honored to have worked with ALL of them and we wish best of luck to all!
And as our CEO Nikola Stojanow has put it:
The Indian blockchain space has seen an immense development in the recent months with the multiple initiatives taken by the government and corporates alike, and we are proud to provide a catalyst with Starfleet India, wherein our selected startups, with their disruptive ideas, have demonstrated impressive progress over the course of this acceleration program. Our partnership with Woodstock Fund and CV Labs cements our commitment to the Indian Blockchain ecosystem and will be actively collaborating to explore investments in not only startups that presented at the Demo Day, but also those that will come up in future. We will continue to evaluate, guide, mentor, and provide access to our wide network, globally. We are delighted to collaborate with IBC Media and identify and work with interesting new startups in India. This only proves that together we all can achieve more, and we hope to continue to educate and invest in companies on the bleeding-edge of this new technology.
If you have missed the event and you want to see it, you can watch it on our YouTube channel.
