BBW23 – Day 2 – QUBIC Labs R&D Innovation Program

[Music] uh good afternoon everybody uh thanks for being here today um we originally had my colleague Brandon wolf scheduled to be our moderator uh he is out sick in Florida um Brandon runs the um the kind of Technology vetting for our startups as they come into our R&D program um so when he told me he couldn't make it I did what any good colleague would do and I stole all his moderation notes um what we're going to do here today um is just give you a glimpse of some of the the projects that we're working on the projects we've funded and the and the and the people working on those projects um and after that we'll just talk about maybe more some more macro macro themes particularly around the R&D project of state of Massachusetts um uh the economic development of it just the general ecosystem as a whole and how they how they all tie together together um but first we're going to take four or five minutes each for our Founders introduce themselves and uh their technology and their Technologies so go ahead Tom thank you John uh my name is Tom Grant I'm a founder of uh Grant fin uh Grant fin is focused on uh investing in liquidity pools uh operating metrics around liquidity pool investing uh and creating Ines around investing in liquidity pools Robert Huber um co-founder of very that um my career has been at the interface of Life Sciences and Computing I'm academic in Neuroscience pharmacology bioinformatics uh most of my work has been on understanding the biological basis of drug addiction and neurological disorders uh got into Health Sciences and got into the drug development process very early on and I've been amazed at the type of changes that we had witnessed since then and I look forward to sharing some of our thoughts about what web 3 and what blockchain technology can do to really make the whole process a lot more effective and efficient uh hi I'm Saji ner I'm the co-founder and CEO of uh bcbe analytics we are Enterprise uh software and we enable uh Enterprises to collaborate with each other using a single login they can work with multiple parties and simplify the workflow so you don't need data managers and Gatekeepers uh we have automated quite a few Assurance processes like audits policy management reviewing documents within an organization or with multiple parties and with the cubic Labs Grant we are adding a new uh kyc solution that will use the blockchain technology to simplify the effort that every customer puts to validate a particular uh client of theirs using the KY process okay now guys that was supposed to take 10 minutes you rre with in two so you're going to put me in big pressure here okay so we might have to add live a little bit um so in the last in the last um session we briefly touched on um the regulatory environment has that impacted on any one of you uh the I I'll dive on that one first uh absolutely absolutely um you know I think the last uh 14 months has been a fascinating time to be in defi in the US um our first sort of uh red flag was block being fined by the SEC uh you know this was a company that was uh doing uh unchain lending uh they uh they had a top tier law firm uh and they found themselves being fine $100 million which to me said the lack of of regulatory Clarity is an issue um and then you you know 2022 was was is a series of issues around Celsius obviously FTX uh and then q1 of this year we had choke 2.0 which I think a few people have referenced in in earlier talks where it became more and more difficult to have a bank account open if you were involved in crypto in the US so you know I think all of us we we do our best to make sure that we don't uh get directly into a regulatory situation but you know the challenge that many of us have is that we see a classic market failure where uh customers investors uh users need a certain service and they can't get it because of the either the lack of regulatory Clarity or uh simply things aren't working as they should in in in cryptand in the US our my view is that this will solve itself to some extent you know as PayPal rolls out a stable coin uh it's hard to believe that will only be used outside of the US uh you know Twitter is getting their their uh payment licenses uh in certain States already so we think over time these things will solve themselves but the regulatory issue that we've had to kind of work through has been challenging uh and we don't think this is going to be quickly solved uh in the next quarter or so but over time we do think it'll work itself out so one of the things we've seen with the R&D program we we had initially started off targeting defi um def5 projects and while we still do that it does create a barrier to entry the uncertainty around the the regulatory landscape and it's just one more thing entrepreneurs have to overcome and while we still work with with defi companies we we have broadened who we're trying to engage with a bit um to perhaps some more traditional industries that aren't as heavily regulated and maybe Rob you might have a different set of challenges cuz I know it's probably more centered around maybe Hipp Hipp like privacy and all that stuff could you talk to that and the different set of challenges you face very very gladly uh there are probably very few academic or or so societ issues that are less touched by regulatory issues than Healthcare um we've been in that for for the beginning and it's all really trying to codify a certain level of trust that everybody has to have in everybody else's actions whether that's a patient who has to trust the doctor whether the doctor has to trust the um provide of medicines that those medicines and those treatments are effective um really at the center of the whole thing is the Food and Drug Administration with the FDA that has to regulate that whole thing and I think it's important to note that the FDA neither has the political mandate nor the um the finances to do any individual testing so they regulate the whole industry but the whole industry is based on trust and uh in each other's actions and so that was a little bit easier in in the past where everything was recorded in analog ways so when I got started um drug development was done by armies of technicians in white lap codes with a clipboard writing down what what happens when you watch an animal when you give them drugs um and that really has changed because that really um it's been all recorded in handwritten notebooks and it was very different to be able to falsify um data and things like that so obviously everything has been converted into a digital workflow and that I personally spent like 25 years of my life replacing this objective perspective that people with clipboards do replacing them with AI Systems computer systems that try to automate behavioral phenotyping um but once you deal with digital documents you also open open a whole Canan of worms because now you can um metadata uh as well as the content can be altered without leaving a trace and that has really created a nightmare for the whole process I got into the whole aspect of digital Ledger technology because it allowed us to way a way to create this truth engine for the type of data that everybody relies on being authentic and verifiable awesome um very thorough um sagy you have uh recently been the recipient of not just a cubic lab's um uh a grant but you've also got a grant for Mass Mutual um or I believe you a partnership with Mass Mutual can you just talk a little bit how the combination of kind of public private um support has has been helpful for you to grow your business yeah so uh basically uh just to add one more point on what uh the earlier question was about regulatory impact uh I think we have one more advantage in that area because we M the rules and regulations published by all the agencies on a daily basis so that is embedded into our product and allows companies to stay compliant so from that perspective as they publish rules we help out other agencies for our own compliance it's more of like uh the regular sock 2 and other stuff but coming back to the question on um uh cubic lab's uh Grant and also how we collaborated with uh Mass Mutual so basically uh like we are primarily an assurance provider like our platform enables companies to uh stay compliant manage policies procedures you know due do proper due diligence on their internal processes get audited Etc but to add to this assurance framework we we see a lot of challenges that many Industries face in implementing know your customer how to you know manage that process because most of the products are very you know geared towards uh banking Financial Services where you need really complex customer validation but think of a real estate company a telecommunication company for them the know your customer process has to be very simple so we found that a blockchain technology can really help in you know turning the efforts to validate a customer into more of a community effort and reduce the overall cost using blockchain and we have overlaid it nicely on top of our Enterprise to Enterprise collaboration so this grant has really helped us to you know s uh bring to fruition uh uh a new product into the Market that will be rolling out soon and uh the Mass Mutual again the same technology helped us to simplify their governance problem in how um they are they were manually annotating various documents and uh and somebody had to uh you know collect all pages like hundreds of pages and create a single copy before they could actually review them and uh make changes to their uh original uh documents so basically this process could again be simplified using this process and recently they published our successful collaboration with a very large Fortune 100 company so these kind of programs really help companies like us to find our footing and grow our business yeah and you know I would say in general Massachusetts has a fairly robust support system for startups um and it is not a it is not a quick fix to scale up some startup or particularly to scale up certain ecosystems or certain emerging Technologies and one of the things we try and do with cubic Labs is it it is a more of a holistic approach where yeah we do have our R&D program we have our incubator program and we want we run Boston blockchain week which we see you growing significantly over the next couple of years because there is also a marketing element to to this there's also a a part of this that saying hey you know this place is open for business um this place is a tech Hub we can compete with the silicon valleys with the New Yorks there is a exceptionally strong academic system here and one of the things we've tried to do with cubic Labs is be a f chummer an enabler to kind of to What's The Saying the the the sum is greater than all the individual Parts how can we bring all the these these things together um we've learned quite a lot along the way so while we obviously started with a process to vet the entrepreneurs you know over time you start to weigh separate factors differently you know yeah the Technologies in place the the business plan is solid um what about the person do they have the relationships do they have the financial Runway to stick at this for a year or two because more often than not the amount of time you can spend on anything is is a strong determinant of of your success um do they you know ideally they've spent fight 20 years in big business because or or maybe a corporate setting because they come to us with a very specific idea I want to do this I have the relationships I understand the market um and there's a much higher likelihood of success if they if they come equipped with those things that's not to say that um that we you know if entrepreneurs come to us without any experience if the idea is good enough but we also know that we have to put together a much more robust package for them to succeed um in terms of entry into the program Tom I think you have um you're probably our longest servant member in the program what have you felt how has the experience helped you in cubic labs and specifically in the orange program sure um so just to take a step back uh I spent a lot of my career in traditional Finance uh my first job was a currency Trader with City Bank um in London uh and I was in that space until 2015 uh on the trading side not the technology side and over that period it was very clear that technology was was playing a more and more important role in every aspect of of Finance uh at that point I took a step back and started a company in 2015 doing Marketplace l ing uh grew that through 2021 sold that uh and in 2022 wanted to do something in the deepy space a lot of what I saw was sort of this convergence of uh onchain and offchain uh def5 that to me created a lot of opportunities a lot of challenges so uh when we started you know for me um I was less concerned about being in a big city I was more concerned around being with like-minded people uh you know one of the aspects of being an entrepreneur is that you are it's a lonely job much of the day uh and so having a group of people around me that were supportive and helpful where we could balance ideas off one another was really helpful uh and generally speaking you know having the um introductions when we needed them uh to people uh either you know legal or other uh areas we needed some support with or you know in some cases uh we were able to get some credits from Amazon web services to allow us to build our cloud cloud uh a cloud space so overall it's a variety of things but I think from my perspective it was really helpful to have all those in one place um and you know one of the things we've tried to do is you know differentiate ourselves from from other um other kind of incubator incubators or accelerators instead of um and instead of in the traditional programmatic you got your lunch and learns you you got like a lot of our entrepreneurs come to us they're very well established to the point that I'm embarrassed sometimes talking to them CU they know a lot more than I do so so really it's more what can we offer from a concert service type of you type of view where we do have advisers in the wings ready to help we have the the CPA ready to help the legal ready to help when they need it when they want it when are they ready to go for a round when can we introduce them to Capital when you know what do they need and when do they need it and for them to have a good enough relationship with us that they can say hey John this is what we need help on so just a higher touch level of support um saggy and Rob are two of our newer um our newer um accepted applicants into the program um Rob what what will this support enable you to do and and affect your trajectory with your company sure no U so first of all we are obviously very very grateful for being accepted to the program uh we love to um take you up on the half of uh the help and and some of the support for commercializing our technology um I think it's a technology that's going to be very important ultimately um it's this truth engine that I referred to before I probably should con cim that we kind of uh um not really using blockchain in the way that I think everybody else in in in this forum thinks of it because we are basically using the wonderful technology that you guys have developed um but we using it not to transfer assets from one wallet to another one we basically using it to transfer a small amount of asset back into our own wallet that ability recording that as a transaction gives us a a note field where we can record information in this case cryptographic hashes that describe a digital workflow and we can record these um in a immutable time stamped and verifiable way with those hashes and access those hashes we can back stop all questions about authenticity of Digital Data U whether that's digital workflow or whether that is is Supply chains or whether that is financial transactions um law enforcement um legal system so we really looking forward to uh taking the the basic functionality that we have test drive with Astros in a year-long trial for pharmaceutical data and see whether we can explore it for a lot of different use cases I'd like to point out that we've got our CEO here John back there the only guy with the red shirt um he is a compliance specialist and and cyber security specialist for heavily regulated industry Moira is uh our specialist for government Affairs uh so if you have any any interests in having any kind of digital workflow that you would like to record in a auditable way uh please talk to us we'd love to um chat okay Sagi same question um yeah so we are uh relatively new but I must uh thank Ian and John like I mean their evaluation and due diligence they were doing a lot of heavy lifting but for us it was a very easy and simple process to you know get validated and come on board within a very short time as John mentioned about the ecosystem we also were able to start a collaboration with another uh company within the ecosystem and uh see what all we can uh do together so there are a lot of synergies we could derive uh in addition to that like as I said this product is primarily geared towards uh a lot of the smaller businesses and quiny has a very robust ecosystem so we look forward to working and collaborating with uh cubic labs to you know uh really validate this whole product around and uh uh grow its acceptance and uh lastly but not the least like uh uh as a collaboration that uh a platform that deals with uh Assurance primarily uh Enterprise sales is a very very complex process to get through you have to deal with multiple layers within an organization and we also look forward to you know leveraging your support to not just have one Mass Mutual as a customer but go to many large Enterprises uh uh scale up through this particular uh opportunity that is available over um thank you s so you know one of the things I think is important is is naturally we you know we're up here on stage we shamelessly plug ourselves always um that's kind of what you tend to do um we are a tax exempt organization and so ultimately you know what what we're trying to do is grow this this this ecosystem grow this environment support entrepreneurs um so we don't have the revenue generating kind of uh mission that other organizations would have which does put us in a great position to engage with all our local partners and and engage in that fulcon position I meant um locally the to break it down like what we're doing is we're saying we are giving out packagings of25 to $30,000 to start entrepreneurs but if we just gave out the cash that's not measurable so what we do is we sit down with them and we we quantify well what are the deliverables for a three to six month Sprint what are you trying to achieve here and there's a couple of things number one by doing that and having a process it means we get quantifiable metrics on what does success look like um number two when we think about further private investment it helps us observe the startups over three to six months and see how they are doing and and and their performance then it's essentially another layer of of due diligence um we are we we are seeing uh one or two small issues in the space where you know as someone pointed out to me two years ago and I really stuck like you know yeah blockchain is a tool but you still got to build a great product uh on top of it so when you come to us you you you you have to have you have to understand blockchain or we provide you with a resource but secondly you have to be able to build a great product on top of it um and we have done some matching with with teams where hey they've come and and I said I like what they have but they're not ready yet but we match them a Brandon are one of the tech leads to get them to the point where they're ready to enter the incubator um it's been a wonderful experience to us we're very thankful to Mast Tech collaborator for enabling us to do this um and these type of emerging Tech ecosystems don't just happen it's you know everyone here all the folks together that join in and and contribute to these events um so just appreciate everyone be down here for us um anyone interested or know anyone interested in the R&D program it's on our website um feel free to send in an application set up a meeting um and I'll just Reserve maybe a last minute or two does anyone have any questions for any of our our tree startups here oh come on up so we can hear you you're okay how do you hear that Rob I did not uh I was asking to see how you see the uh intellectual property nfts uh develop out in the uh biotech space intellectual properties of nfts in the biotech space so yeah I I I probably stay out of that discussion at this point um we we do have um um the the the law component working on this it's it's it's a it's an interesting field that's for sure that I've I've gotten into that is uh very different to what I've understood from the IP field in in biotech and and uh so a lot of the IP is owned and it's about licensing Technologies and uh getting into it it's not my my real for so I I would rather refer to somebody who knows a lot more about this than I do okay um one thing before we finish up that that's just interesting to note is um you're going to hear a lot of today I'm not a lawyer or I'll defer there's still a lot of opaqueness and vagueness um and a level of complexity that I see every day as applicants come in theyve been so much trying trying to describe to me how it works that they actually can't tell me what it is um and we still do see a disconnect between the tech heads who they basically understand a technology and they they've created I I'm blew in the face from saying this they've create they've created a technology they cannot they don't know the industries they're trying to sell into and thus they can't really address the pain points um of that industry and nor can they communicate effectively to an executive level person on the business side how this will affect your bottom line how this will affect your Revenue your operational efficiencies and one of the things we do keep a close eye on to is um you need to know how it works but you really need to know say what it is too you know you've got to be able to communicate and we do have a huge technology of of tech heads that are struggling communicating to the business heads and it's something we are struggling to adapt and work with the entrepreneurs with as they communicate like hey you know different audiences different messages um but again we could chat for this stuff all all day but I'm here after as anyone wants to chat any of the guys are uh thanks so much for coming down and I give it up our tree our tree aspiring starcup thank you so [Music] much