SUMMARY
The Pitch42 challenge saw blockchain and crypto startups pitch to a jury comprising blockchain expert and entrepreneur Ajeet Khurana, Persistence's Mikhil Pandey and BuidlersTribe's Raghu Mohan
Three of the nine finalists went on to win $25K each as the prize money from blockchain and crypto incubator BuidlersTribe
Bru Finance, MooPay, Syndr, SaraVerse, The Blockchain School were among the finalists at Pitch42 at The Crypto Summit by Inc42 Plus
While the blockchain industry is still in the early stages of its development in India, the past year has brought a big boom and now startups are looking at innovative models that only have a product-market fit in India, but also internationally. We wanted to highlight the brightest Indian blockchain startups and what better place to do it than at The Crypto Summit by Inc42 Plus, India’s largest crypto and blockchain-focused event, which concluded this past weekend.
One of the highlights of The Crypto Summit was Pitch42. Hosted by Inc42 in the association with BuidlersTribe and Persistence, Pitch42 saw 9 early-stage blockchain and crypto startups pitching to a jury comprising blockchain expert and entrepreneur Ajeet Khurana, Persistence’s Mikhil Pandey and BuidlersTribe’s Raghu Mohan.
After a shortlisting round where over 100 startups sent in their applications, we selected nine startups for the Pitch42 live pitches and three of these went on to win $25K each as the prize money from blockchain and crypto incubator BuidlersTribe.
The nine Pitch42 finalists will get direct entry to BuidlersTribe’s incubation programme. The programme will include:
- One-month free incubation programme
- Sessions held by experts specialising in product, tech, marketing, funding, growth, community and UX
- Private AMAs with experts from the crypto industry
Meet The Winners!
Bru Finance
Founded by Ashish Anand, Falguni Pandit, and Abhishek Bhattacharya, Mumbai-based Bru Finance is a wholly owned project of Whrrl and is conceptualised as the bridge between centralised financial systems and DeFi. Whrrl is claimed to be India’s largest private blockchain network with more than 1,400 agri commodity warehouses and lenders having already tokenised $500 Mn worth agri commodities.
Founded in 2019, Bru Finance is bringing those same assets to DeFi world whereby participants in DeFi economy can lend to farmers or agri commodity traders and exporters against commodities stored in the warehouses on Whrrl platform. In addition, these real world assets can be traded as synthetics.
MooPay
Moopay is billed as a no-code, non-custodial payments platform for digital commerce for merchants, which supports a number of cryptocurrencies. It offers a payments infrastructure solution for merchants as well as a native token to run the system. It is also developing a native cross-chain swap which can be used during settlement.
Founded in 2020 by Ajay Pal Singh, Kamaljeet Singh, and Ankur Grover, the company has built a payments button feature to let online service providers integrate crypto payments, with the cross-chain swap supporting multiple currencies. QuickPay has in-built payment routing, to allow users to easily split the payments into multiple wallets/people and distribute commission on every payment to multiple people.
Syndr
About to be launched at the end of September 2021, Syndr is a DeFi protocol that allows investors to borrow synthetic assets against their stablecoins. It will support DAI, FEI & LUSD and other USD-pegged stablecoins at launch. Syndr enables users to borrow/issue synthetic assets in the form of fungible ERC20 tokens called dTokens(or derived tokens).
Founded by Vyom Sharma, the company claims that its minimum collateralization ratio (MCR) of 110% is currently the lowest in the DeFi space. It claims that for 110 USDC, Syndr will enable anyone to borrow/issue $100 worth of any dToken or synthetic asset.
Synthetic assets are tokenized derivatives engineered to simulate the price of another asset. For example, a synthetic AAPL (Apple) token simulates an actual AAPL share by always being equal to its current market price. The synthetic assets that Syndr will launch with include stocks of US giants like Apple, Tesla or Chinese tech companies like Baidu or even cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and others.
The Other Pitch42 Finalists
And here are the other finalists of Pitch42 who will get entry to the one-month BuidlersTribe incubation programme.
Payscript
Founded by Nadeem Shaikh, Payscript is looking to address cryptocurrency payments adoption among merchants. It operates a wallet through which crypto owners can pay for any service or product using multiple cryptocurrencies.
Moreover, merchants using Payscript can even look out for vendors who are ready to accept cryptocurrency payment gateways and get them to integrate Payscript in their payment reception interface or POS. It offers a single-window checkout system for crypto and fiat payments, along with a crypto-backed card for payments at retailers.
Boolien Networks
Founded by Pravanjan Patnaik, Sudipto Naskar, and Leeshant Sahu, Boolien is a blockchain platform for gamified multimedia experiences backed by NFT. It has launched Vizva, a marketplace for content creators and consumers, which lets creators post multimedia content including experiential movies, games, audio, video and digital merchandise, which are dropped as NFTs.
The creative community uses the Bool token to access the Boolien ecosystem. Bools also unlock exclusive features for consumers. Creators can earn Bools from followers as a form of support or payment.
Bramble
Founded by Nitesh Mishra, Rahul Soshte, and Pramodaa Kalkoti, Bramble is a blockchain network that is built around creating a universal ecosystem for game and application developers to reward their users with cryptocurrency. It integrates into games and apps as an API that allows developers to create a rewards system around the Bramble token.
The system is designed in a way that rewards are automatically added to the Bramble wallet, where they can be converted or withdrawn. It also allows devs to integrate the Bramble token into in-app purchase flows. Bramble is targeting Web2.0 developers and looking to get them to migrate to Web3.0 with the API.
LegitDoc
Founded in 2018 by Neil Martis, Francis Serrao, and Shesha Prasad, LegitDoc is a blockchain-based system for issuing and verifying digital documents. The Bengaluru-based startup provides solutions for crossforge, revolt against forgery, document verification and other use-cases. It offers a tamper-proof digital documents verification system with a drag and drop interface, data privacy safeguards, and proprietary algorithm tools.
SaraVerse
SaraVerse claims to be India’s first metaverse built on Polygon where new-age creators, game developers and businesses can build virtual worlds and communities, NFTs, and deploy and train digital AI avatars called SARAs or socially-aware robotic assistants.
Founded by Praveen Anasuya in Hyderabad, SaraVerse will allow users to create and trade avatars in various series for use across metaverse platforms. SaraVerse will also feature virtual items such as NFTs that can be bought and traded by users.
The Blockchain School
Founded in 2019, The Blockchain School is looking to plug the gaps when it comes to blockchain and crypto awareness, education and employability of developers in these emerging fields. Its courses include introduction to NFTs, Polygon and other chains as well as other topics related to DeFi and crypto.
The platform also works with existing crypto exchanges and blockchain companies for educational modules and edtech courses. It claims to have 15,000+ learners and also enables learners to get the right job via its ‘Hiring Nodes’.
Updates & correction note:
September 21, 2021| 12:30 PM
- An earlier version of the article erroneously mentioned that Syndr would support fiat-backed cryptocurrencies. We have rectified the article
- Added names of cofounders of Bramble and Bru Finance
