Kisso Selvan - NEXUS Startup Competition Pitch #9: KRNL Labs - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hi guys, I'm Keso from Kernel Labs. I'm here to present our new product open box which is a solution to the AI trust crisis. Um and yeah, let me begin by introducing my founders uh who didn't have a chance to make it today. to here is our tech lead CTO. Uh he started this career very early on in Microsoft uh seventh employee in Europe.

Uh and he's also the parent patent holder of pushmail which is the technology behind Blackberry in messaging. Um Aim is from an investment background. He used to work at Black Rockck uh and he was a founding partner of Eternal Capital. In terms of the trust crisis and the current state, the trust market is $3 billion market that is rapidly growing. There are regulatory pressures like the EU AI act that enforce uh that high-risk or critical risk AI applications need to conform to certain standards of governance and accountability.

Uh and there are serious financial penalties uh going up to 35 million or 7% of your global turnover. Um so we see this as a impact that really stretches far beyond single uh single companies and it effectively applies like GDPR uh beyond a single uh single state. Um so essentially today's systems don't have the accountability and governance measures and uh going onto our solution what are we doing we're transforming the black box of AI into an open box. Um how do we actually work? We work by aggregating the logs generated during the training process and data acrruel um and essentially standardizing this in a format that we can hash and store on a blockchain ledger.

Other than that AI companies remain within their own systems. So we just work with their existing cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure uh and they don't experience it as a crypto solution. Um our control plane is the core technology that uses the blockchain and it produces attestations for every step that happens including for aentic workflows which are increasingly going into commercial applications. Uh and in terms of our USP we do have competitors in traditional markets but no one's doing this with traditional uh cryptographic verifiability and no one's covering the entire lineage. Everyone's very focused on observability metrics post deployment which is simply not sufficient for some of the new regulations.

Um and we have live case studies of clients uh like this one with a media company that owns a large data set of Indian media. We're helping them create VLMs uh that are fully governed for watermarked uh outputs and essentially making sure that any content generated is traceable back to the model. So they can generate revenue from dubbing to many different India Indian based languages. Um another case study is with a large DPIN provider in Korea.

Curious what's the price point that you see people willing to pay for this specific process. Oh this specific service. Yeah. So that's pretty much mapped to the um cost of compliance. So it's something that people are willing to pay if they're going to be fined such a large hefty fee and people are generally looking to sell to the EU.

Uh it's so it's something like GDPR where you are forced to comply and rather than building this system yourself from scratch, you'd much rather buy a SASbased product uh and essentially integrate it. So we have everything from um sort of a entry-level SAS uh product that you can integrate on your own to bespoke contracts like the last two case studies where we go hands on the ground with our solution architects uh and actually work with your team. So for that it's is a bit more bespoke pricing. Um I'm happy to chat numbers with you after but we we keep it private at the moment.

Uh could you go into your go to market strategy a bit? I'm curious about you know the sales cycle of the conversations.

So we have a twofold go to market at the moment. So we're forming relationships and partnerships with the large cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure. They all effectively have an marketplace type dynamic where you can sell your SAS product through them and because most people use those cloud providers, it just gets tacked onto their existing billing. Um, so they just pay their AWS bill and we're just another solution they're playing on top. Uh, again, sort of 12-month enterprise contracts.

Uh and and then the other kind of twofold approach is um actually working directly with consultants. So large enterprises usually go to a big consultant, ask them how do I solve this problem? They suggest a few options. We're working directly with the consultants to educate them so they know that we're the best solution to integrate for those problems.