BlockStart: Startup Pitches​

[Music] thank you very much so um are you seeing my my screen now yeah myself okay so so to to start off by uh briefly presenting myself so i'm juan fernandez i'm a block startus accelerator manager and investment analyst at brightpixel brightpixel is an early stage vc held by one of the main retail groups in portugal sonai but i'm here today to to specifically talk about block start so this blockchain accelerator and so telling a bit of how a neo-funded accelerator is managing to boost blockchain adoption in in f semis and uh also it's fair to say that we are not alone so block start is not a sole project uh eu funded project we have much more other of these kind of initiatives previously and currently ongoing uh opportunities um ranging from from different spectrums uh of blockchain field but mostly committed to to boost blockchain adoption uh by supporting startup projects and also aiming to to try to to foster the implementation of these technologies in in europe and of course that with horizon europe program starting and also with the ai and blockchain investment fund uh the the coming years will will be full of opportunities in terms of eu funding projects so but block start specifically is a new funded blockchain accelerator as i've said uh it is supporting 60 solution providers what we call the dlt startups and 60 end user smes so sme is eager to adopt and to validate blockchain solutions in the retail fintech and ict fields so quite a broad spectrum not only the the typical fintech field also retail and even the the broader sense of ict almost 800 000 euros equity free to support both startups and smes we are running three acceleration programs from 2019 until early next year and this all consortium is held by early stage vc brightpixel the company i represent also innovation consultancy firm civilia and startup community f6s so what does it offer after all so it's startup is eligible to up to 20k some some support uh to to further boost their blockchain development and also four and a half caper sme adopter so mainly to cover administrative expenses and the time commitment of people to to be able to test these solutions market validation so demos and tests with potential clients a great opportunity one of the main ones and growth support so from mentoring of both internal and external mentors both business and tech wise and networking so the presence and showcasing these projects in great events like european blockchain convention and matchmaking with investors and other relevant partners and we are here resorting not only on our own capabilities and network but also on the the great ecosystem partners so ranging from investors tech and investors community also associations and and awesome events like european blockchain convention of course and also the the startups are having the opportunity to be mentored not only by our consortium experts but but also external mentors so investors business and innovation managers ctos fellow startup founders so we are trying to to provide as much support possible to our startups to make sure that they will be able to deliver great blockchain solutions that will impact our economy and our society after all and so how does it work so the structure of each of the three acceleration programs it starts with an ideation kickoff with the two days event where 20 startups pitch and also meet with smes after this this event we selected top 10 startups that move to the actual acceleration stage the the prototype stage four month to further develop and validate their mvp solutions and finally in two months pilot stage for the top five starter finalists to implement their pilots in smes and in the end pitch their achievements and their lessons learned at the demo day so until now uh about some quick stats we have over 200 startup applications also great interest from the sme community 100 smes eager to validate these solutions from over 40 countries so until now we had 40 out of 60 startups already supported with 34 pilots implemented and over 90 percent satisfaction rate but what is really heartwarming for us is to hear the the positive feedback from our startups so from the the this most recent acceleration program we had loan exchange fintech started claiming that we provided real value also ibiza in the agritech field stating that this kind of of programs are great for a lean and fast product development motor blockchain in mobility and digital identity field they they emphasize the networking to improve both their products and business development and even in the case of sensfinity in supply chain they managed to onboard three new customers so i challenge you to then check all our startups profiles uh in the link below but um it's also important to say that we have still two more opportunities for both blockchain startups so until the 26th of may we will have our last open call for blockchain startups so feel free to check also this link to to see either if you are a startup and consider applying or if you know within your community any blockchain developer that could benefit benefit from this opportunity also in case of smes they will be able to until the 6th of july to apply to our last open call and so either if you are an sme or you are aware or connected with smes that could uh be interested in testing blockchain solutions uh that could be fitting to their scope feel free also to to to mention our program and we have even a small kind of survey uh to quickly validate if uh blockchain and dlt could make sense for the scope of their activity and and for their needs but um [Music] i think that nothing is better than hear the true protagonists so you should be able to hear in the coming 20 minutes their testimonials mirko from infidelia martin from viterella agata from rex io and rain is from kvn so these are four of our startup finalists from the first acceleration program and so please guys take it away and tell us a bit more about your great progresses okay hello everybody uh i'm irokiko which co-founder and ceo of nvidia and right now i will explain you what is what is nvidia so um infidelia is a seamless invoice verification for invoice financing to make it simple uh invoice financing is getting the money in advance based on your invoices but this is not so simple for small companies as due to the lack of trust they are not getting the finance and the reasons for this are also additional and these are the fraudulent invoices lack of data due diligence and a lack of communication at the same time 50 european smes need bank loans and while this amount is really high less than 15 percent really getting them to solve this we built in fidya as a perfect solution for both smes and financial institutions for smes as we are providing them finance in advance for financial institutions as we are providing them risk-free and scalable loans at first we targeted small manufacturing and distribution companies due to the industry experience and the way that we can really track their activities in our productivity app that we built on top of art recorder which is a blockchain platform of our choice however we are also expanding to help all good sustainable and ethical companies all companies that are actually doing good for the world and in doing so we piloted in a blog start with five great and amazing companies that really really showcased how they do their job how they do that uh processes that are really confirming that they are worth investing and in a block start where we had a great experience we defined our competitive landscape position ourselves get into the factory market in detail and of course define our business model and a business plan and a lot of people contributed to this i'm using this opportunity to really thank this team as some of the people really engaged a lot in this some are still waiting to onboard but all of these people are really really contributed and i'm really grateful for all these people and i'm grateful to blockstart as well and truly grateful because we had a great time here we had a great organization by joao and we had great mentorship sessions with ugnos our mentor and during this time we really uh answered some tough questions and we were really placed into some deliverables kpis all of the things that really push your startup to grow because if you're a startup there's only way up there's no other way and block start is really providing this as i mentioned great organization by joao and great meetings we had with our pilot testers five of them uh membrane train mars band bees and toys black petrov and leste really contributed to showcase our solution to really filter our assumptions our ideas to further on our design thinking and of course to find a product market fit we continued with this and joined other accelerators joined many of them and with r3 venture development really get into that mentoring sessions that help us create that lender's dashboard which is our next milestone is something that we are building why we are building that because we want to support all highly ethical and sustainable companies all these small companies that will grow and that need finance to grow and our vision of course is that by helping these companies we are doing good for the world of course uh great help in this is uh european union and old european union programs because i would give this impression uh three years ago when i was building an nfp startup uh in a blockchain space nobody really knew what i'm talking about right now and thanks to all of these programs we know that people are basically knowing people are interested and while we're making research while it's speaking with people we're placing seeds for their thoughts how to include blockchain in their products how to build upon blockchain what is blockchain how this really can help improve the world itself and make the overall progress thank you thank you so much yeah thank you mirko i'm gonna take over and my name is martin schaffner i'm blockchain architect at detroit and today i'm happy to present you track and trust our blockchain based tracking solution for humanitarian supply chains that we worked on in the block start accelerator program before we started with tracking trust we were facing the question how can blockchain technology make the humanitarian supply chain more efficient and as you might guess it is very inefficient until today let's imagine a natural disaster occurs and a humanitarian organization decides to send some goods to the disaster area and the problem that occurs really quickly is that um the humanitarian organization loses really quickly track of where the goods are and whether whether they have arrived or not um how many of the goods are still left so there's a lot of uncertainty along the entire supply chain not only due to um um less of internet access the closer you get to the disaster area and these are the challenges that we are trying to solve with our solution track and trust and before block start we already had an mvp stage ready and where we had tracking accountability so where we could see where the shipment currently is and who is in charge of and we documented handovers of the goods on the blockchain itself and to get some integrity into the data of our system and the entire system is also meant to provide offline functionality with a satellite infrastructure which i will come later um to and last but not least it's a use case agnostic so it's not only meant for humanitarian supply chains but can be used for any other type of supply chain as well in block start um we wanted to take the chance to give the give the track and trust system a little bit more maturity and make it more market ready and therefore we implem implemented a multi-tenancy in the system so that users only see what they are currently have to see so which is related to them and we also implemented a self-service onboarding so actors can just sign up and automatically and generate key pairs and before that we had to provide it to them and we enabled a mobile signing technology where the actors can for instance scan the qr code on the shipment itself rather than doing this all on a web application and these three kpis helped us increasing the security and transparency in the network and here you can see an example um where we send a 2 000 snow shoes to munich and this is of course just an example and shows um how you can create such an event for for sending humanitarian aids and here you can see a dashboard where we have for example the successful shipment of lobsters to function which is also an example from one of our testers and beneath a shipment against munich and so the humanitarian organization has an easy overview on where the goods currently are and in the pilot stage we tested together with olympics albiquire and selena toda um the the entire track and trust system so especially the the new um features that we have and the overall um feedback was very good and they really liked the onboarding process and also said that track and trust could increase the transparency and the quality of the supply chains that they are currently using and our lessons about block start are similar to um to mirkos and the organization was really really well um joao um was a really good mentor to us and kept us on our toes and had the bigger picture in mind so that also helped us a lot being productive because we could make um really detailed timetables um and could adjust this if necessary and we also had a chance to gather new partnerships um for example with the sme adopters that we tested with and we are also happy to promote track and trust in events like here at the european blockchain convention and to promote our solution after the blockstar program was over um we leveraged the mousse we gathered from the from the adopters to um to ask the uk's uk space agency and the german space agency to support the project in form of funding um especially in regards to the satellite-enabled offline functionality where we handed in an application to the european space agency to develop satellite-based offline functionality and that's it from my side thank you very much and i'm open for questions thank you martin hello everyone my name is agata and i represent rex io company proud alumni of block start program what is rxio it's basically a digital notarization service blockchain based of course we're using ethereum but how to make it more understandable imagine that you are buying an insurance for your car and you need to send a picture to the agent and most likely you're doing it now by email or sms or any other messenger messaging app and this is causing some kind of fraud opportunities because you don't have to send the picture of your car or the picture could be taken previously or in different locations and so on so what we're doing we're making sure that the pictures taken are the ones which are supposed to get to the agent and the agency can verify that on blockchain using hashes of the data cent we've designed a simple interface because we want to put away all the blockchain complexities from the end users we don't want them to even know that they are using blockchain that's mostly too complicated for a casual internet user so we've designed a simple user user-friendly and intuitive interface both for the administrator who is validating the data online and for in this case in the insurance sector for the user to send the pictures how does that work so basically uh the magic behind direct io is that we do not have to change any existing infrastructure we are plugging into the infrastructure between the data source and the target and we're not storing anything and that's also beautiful we are not responsible for any of your data we're not taking this risk everything stays on your premises what we are sending to blockchain are only hashes hashes of the data the rex io itself consists of secretary notary and some administration panel and we are providing full end-to-end chain of trust for the data which we are securing um rex io has rooted from the company that i also work for which is dac the company is a software development and hardware integration company and our competitive advantage is that we rooted in r d activities and this is also how rxio came to life the first attempts and more let's say theoretical architecture of how it should look has been presented at the conference in budapest where we presented results of the productive four xero project where we were partnering and this was also eu funded project so we are talking here about the beautiful chain of activities which were leveraged with eu money and then a few months later in october we decided to take a try and build a demonstrator during the hackathon in germany and in march only two months one month after uh establishing the company which happened in february 2020 we got accepted to block start and then all the stuff happened so first of all the most important part from my perspective as a business person is that we managed to conduct free pilot implementations this is super big value for a small early stage company which is trying to get to the market to say okay we are only half a year old but we already have three pilot implementations in three different industries that is still a huge value for us and we are still exploring this path of of implementing rex io in different industry not only focusing on one particular use case and it seems to work from the business perspective so far uh blockchain participation really supported our business development uh except apart from pilot implementations we gained a lot of uh business leads which we are closing or exploring right now uh we prepared all the pre-sales materials that we need for for that that was one of our kpis we've conducted customer interviews which is super important uh from the perspective of developing new business and of course we finished the prototype but we all know that making the technology work is not that difficult as making the business work properly and uh what i wanted to say about blockstart is that it is an amazing opportunity for networking and they are really taking care of us and our presence at this event is a perfect example of that and to sum it up i need to say that it is one of four events that block start invited us to this month and we would not be able to join those uh without them so um don't hesitate if you plan to apply to a upcoming blockchain call i think that's really great opportunity to move your business forward thank you very much and in case you have any questions feel free to reach me by email or any social media channel thank you very much so i'll take over from my side so think thank you for presentation i got them uh my name is zenis and i'm the founder and ceo of cadion and let me briefly explain of what we do and then jump straight into our experience at block start which aligns very much with the other startups but with a unique spin in our case so a lot of physical products are sensitive to environmental conditions such as food pharma chemicals industrial equipment and others currently there's no easy way to verifiably observe them as existing solutions for supply chain monitoring are fixed expensive and not adaptable such as for last mile deliveries that are exploding in popularity we at kedian enable verifiable real-time monitoring and we do this by providing mobile easy to implement iot devices like this one we produce them ourselves our purpose build and they're able to monitor temperature humidity light co2 movement as well as other quality factors in real time with all analytics uh tools implemented and what's unique is that each device actually creates its own identity creates onset of private public key and on the device itself it uh digitally signs every single measurement in a fully uh immutable and verifiable way as well as calibration certificates are stored on the device we provide these tools with no upfront costs for our users this increases efficiency of operations and cuts losses and we provide our services with just a fixed monthly subscription instead of industry standard five figure setup and implementation demand for cold chain monitoring solutions is expected to grow by at least 20 annually with stringent regulations especially in the european union regarding the storage and shipment of sensitive products we have successfully launched our service with more than seven companies in the food delivery sector an industry of an annual growth of over 50 percent however that's just the start as we're working towards enabling our technology for a lot of industries that are all growing exponentially and we already have multiple companies in the pharmaceutical and medical logistics field wait listed and we do have the right team that we assembled during block start um and uh with very wide experience uh in supply chain and iot product manufacturing so jumping straight into block starts as mentioned when we joined blockstar we were quite early we started with a technological prototype and a very small team of just two three people and during block start we grew to over seven people working at the company right now and we fully built out our mvp of both hardware and software we produced over 30 devices for of the first mvp during the program and we were able to launch six pilot projects with the companies over here and this includes companies like fish wholesaler blue circle b2b food delivery b2c delivery as well as last mile logistics operators and what's quite unique about the block start and what helped us so tremendously to push our business forward is that if you're a technology heavy uh company you always try to improve and you feel a product is not ready enough to launch but here you had this very nice push to launch with smes in europe that are very open to implementing and the blockstar provided the funding not only to us to develop our solution but they also gave an extra incentive for companies to take this extra step to try a solution which might not be fully ready by providing also funding to the sme adopters and it took us a couple of months to get everything right but at the end of the program we were happy that we were able to convert all of those pilot customers to actually paying customers and this was the initial start of actually moving from just a research development project to an actually functioning company we are now seeing uh 70 sales conversion rate and a lot of interest as mentioned previously in other industries as well and our clients smear doctors have been super happy about the opportunity to participate in block start and trying out our solution to actually get meaningful results uh very very quickly so to summing up uh with the help of lock start we not only moved from just a prototype to actually launching it in the real market uh here in the european union but it also helped us to receive follow-on funding as well as joining techstars uh one of the largest global uh investors and accelerators in in the startup space which is currently helping us to to build this in a very fully scalable way launch new industries new markets and uh make this make this much bigger impact than we are have already done so far so thank you very much for your attention happy to answer any questions if you have feel free to reach out to me with the email address provided here thank you hello thank you for the four presentations and joao's presentation about bloxer you