An amazing, eventful 2018

At Sphere Identity, with the company’s focus on the non-crypto industry for its sales channels, the team was largely isolated from the crypto bear market and centered on building a leading team and product.

Research and development:
R&D has been a necessary and continuous effort. Since forming the company in late 2017, the focus has been on turning the vision of self-sovereign identity into a working product which solves the real and growing problem of personal data ownership.

The goal has always been to build a solution which allows:
1. Users to easily retrieve their personal information.
2. Users to control which 3rd party can access what data.
3. Users to receive rewards for the data they share with registered businesses.
4. Streamlined customer onboarding (data access management) for 3rd parties.

The R&D endeavours resulted in assessing and keeping track of:
1. The current state of distributed storage.
2. Blockchain’s general scalability trajectory.
3. The identity industry’s global composition and its key trends.
4. The gaps in the identity industry which only a self-sovereign product could solve.

We were, and continue to be very comfortable with the commercial choices made around product-market-fit and path-to-market. In other words, the problem we’re solving is global and we know how we’re going to sell it.

Timing the market is another deeply-discussed topic in start-up conversations. Launch something too early, and you may fail to scale by being too reliant on untested 3rd party technology, or there may not be sufficient market demand for the product. Launch too late, and it may be easier to copy existing products but much more difficult to enter and succeed in a market.

In context to Sphere Identity:
1. With major data breaches occurring every single week, the demand for individuals to own and control their personal information has been steadily increasing and is pre-exponential (early stages). A distinct market for self-sovereign products is emerging, partly fuelled by the advent of the blockchain.

2. The technology to power self-sovereign products is also very early. Sphere is in the ‘goldilocks’ zone — not too early, but early enough to learn from pioneers and build a better design to secure a leadership position in the market as it matures.

Considerations when scaling Sphere as a business:
• The development team: We sought far and wide for developers who are highly experienced but also have the patience and finesse to enhance and integrate a bleeding edge code.
• Retaining company culture in the workplace amidst rapid staff growth. Our multinational team represents over 12 nationalities and is a great mix of experience across development, market, sales, support, etc.
• Building a product that actually required distributed systems. (i.e. many things don’t need a blockchain).
• Adopting a tokenization model that created real utility and enabled, not stifled, the product (utility).
• Getting the brand and product vision embedded into the zeitgeist of the global identity industry.
• Using new, unproven technology and partners, while managing risk (Securing Plan B for everything).

Growth in 2018:
Since late 2017, Sphere grew from a small team of five to an organisation with all the qualities of an identity software company.

We now have 37 full-time staff, including:

• An amazing development team
• A strong product team
• The start of a global sales team with teams for marketing, sales support,
and customer experience in place.

New Zealand is a great place for building software, as evidenced by the quality of our development team and the substantial R&D grant that we received from the government.

Singapore:
We, however, need to be in proximity to larger markets for our products. In Q4, 2018, we opened an office in Singapore, which enables us to be closer to our distributors, customers and key industry participants. This subsidiary office currently contains 5 staff (mainly sales) and will scale to around 8–12 over the course of the year.

Other exciting 2018 milestones and achievements:
• Built a native Android and iOS apps for end users.
• Built high levels of security and privacy into the platform and are conducting on-going research to ensure proactive national and cross-border data protection compliance, including GDPR.
• Have developed an innovative Identity SaaS pricing model.
• Building the global sales team for both direct and channel sales.
• Have developed the vast majority of our business application and platform.
• Have built a token-based rewards system using XID tokens.
• Have built a new website to be released prior to launch so that customers can buy our Identity SaaS product online and download the app.
• Built a customer experience team and systems ready to support customers across the world.
• Built localisation so the personal and business apps can be released in additional international languages.
• Have had a technical audit of our platforms and applications completed by industry analysts.
• Have presented at several key identity and blockchain conferences.
• Named one of the ‘5 Blockchain Identity Companies to Watch’ in 2018 by One World Identity.
• Became a founding member of Digital Identity New Zealand, a government and industry platform designing New Zealand’s future Identity ecosystem.
• Became a member of the Kantara Initiative and are active in the creation of global standards for consent receipt.

2019 and preparing for launch:
2019 is going to be the year of our first product release. We will launch our new solution for customer onboarding and the personal apps enabling individuals to securely store their identity documents, to use them for onboarding or share them with whom they choose.

We look forward to commercial success as we help businesses address their onboarding problems.

We will also start empowering individuals to manage their own identity. The global and secure nature of our products means that they can be used by those with traditional identities and those who currently do not have a digital identity. Importantly, we are providing a safe software and do not have access to an individual’s data.

This is also a big year for ongoing R&D, as the blockchain world matures and we further develop AI and Image Recognition technology to strengthen and expand our portfolio of products.

A big thanks:
We would like to say thanks to the Sphere Identity community who have made our journey so far possible. Your feedback and support have been of great value.

Thanks also to our amazing team who have worked tirelessly on the bleeding edge of blockchain and distributed technologies to build new identity products.

2018 was a very productive year and we look forward to launching this year and carrying out ongoing development.

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