Finland funds SOMA
SOMA secures business grant from Business Finland, a division of the Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy
“We are extremely proud Business Finland has selected SOMA, recognizing the promise and long-term value of our new social marketplace,” said Jukka Hilmola, co-founder and CEO at SOMA. “This validates our next-generation blockchain-based e-commerce model, currently in preview on Android. These funds will help us accelerate our go-to-market strategy and meet our aggressive growth targets for the remainder of 2018 and into 2019.”
— Jukka Hilmola, SOMA CEO
A first? Or one of the first?
To the best of our knowledge, SOMA is the first private-sector blockchain project to receive backing by a major world government. If we’re not the first, we’re one of the first.
Business Finland has given us Round One funding of €50,000. This may not sound like much by startup funding standards, but Round One is BF’s way of testing a startup’s ability to deliver prior to signing the big checks. Pending our accomplishment of certain benchmarks they’ve set out for us, we can be eligible for Round Two funding of €500,000-€1M, and subsequent Round 3 funding of €3M-€20M. And those amounts are…significant.
A validation of the SOMA business model
As you may have guessed, Business Finland isn’t in the, well, business of handing out large amounts of money to just anyone. Their review process is rigorous, and they had a lot of tough questions for SOMA leadership.
The funding will be huge for helping SOMA through that crucial pre-revenue stage that kills so many startups.
SOMA will launch a pilot program in Q1 2019 to prove our revenue model, after which we will begin scaling globally.
Read the full press release here.
About SOMA
On legacy ecommerce platforms, anonymous usernames and depersonalized storefronts strip trade interactions of an important social element. Additionally, buyers lack a definitive way to ensure the authenticity of items. Enter SOMA. Our Heimdall Protocol stops forgeries and counterfeiting by validating ownership and provenance history on the blockchain. Social media elements bring personalization and interaction to trade, and allow users to monetize social influence, while a rewards system incentivizes beneficial collaboration and ensures that value-adding services are compensated. Soma is a free-market ecosystem — free of market manipulation, price-fixing, gouging, and bloat.
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