GVFL Leads $3M Investment in Antier Solutions to Scale Enterprise Blockchain Infrastructure

India’s pioneer venture capital firm GVFL has led a $3 million investment in Antier Solutions Pvt. Ltd., marking a strategic investment in enterprise blockchain infrastructure as adoption expands across government systems, financial institutions, and enterprise workflows.

Antier’s first institutional capital after over a decade of bootstrapped growth. It comes at a time when blockchain is increasingly being evaluated as a foundational layer for digital trust, verification, and financial infrastructure, particularly across public sector and BFSI use cases.

Founded by Vikram R. Singh, Antier Solutions is an enterprise blockchain engineering firm focused on building infrastructure for secure transactions, verifiable workflows, and institutional-grade applications. Headquartered in Mohali, the company operates with a team of over 600 specialists and has delivered over 1,000 projects across enterprises, startups, and government institutions globally.

The company’s leadership team also includes Ashish Pareekh, Chief Financial Officer at Antier Solutions Pvt. Ltd., who is overseeing the company’s financial strategy and institutional growth roadmap following the investment.

Its flagship platform, EduBlock Pro, is a blockchain-based examination management system designed to enable tamper-proof processes and auditability, and is deployed in government recruitment exams, including with the Punjab State AIDS Control Society.

The company also develops blockchain-based financial infrastructure through its Programmable Money Infrastructure platform, supporting use cases such as tokenisation, digital asset management, and institutional financial workflows.

Commenting on the investment, Mihir Joshi, Managing Director at GVFL, said, “Enterprise adoption of blockchain is moving into real-world use cases across governance systems and financial infrastructure. We see strong potential in platforms that can deliver verifiable, secure, and scalable systems for institutional deployment, and Antier Solutions is well positioned in this space.”

Vikram R. Singh, Founder of Antier Solutions Pvt. Ltd., said, “This investment marks an important milestone in our journey as we transition from a bootstrapped organisation to one backed by institutional capital. Our focus remains on building trusted digital infrastructure for governments, financial institutions, and enterprises at scale.”

The capital will be used to scale Antier’s platform offerings, expand deployments across government and BFSI sectors, and strengthen its presence in key international markets, including the United States, MENA, and Asia-Pacific.

TruScholar Secures Pre‑Series A Funding to Build AI‑Powered Digital Credential and Employability Platform

TruScholar, a digital credentialing and employability platform powered by AI and Blockchain, has successfully closed its Pre-Series A funding round.

This milestone marks an important step in TruScholar’s journey to build trusted digital infrastructure that connects institutions, learners, and employers through verifiable credentials and career-enablement tools.

Solving a Larger Problem Than Digitisation

Across education and hiring ecosystems, credentials have increasingly moved into digital formats. However, most certificates, marksheets, and academic records still remain static in nature — often stored as PDFs or paper documents and verified through fragmented manual processes.

While digitisation improves storage and accessibility, it does not fully solve the more critical issues of trust, usability, and outcome relevance.

Institutions continue to face operational and compliance burdens in managing records and responding to verification requests. Employers struggle with credential validation and trusted candidate screening. Learners, despite holding authentic credentials, often find that these documents do not automatically translate into career direction, employability, or opportunity.

In many cases, credentials remain proof of completion, but not instruments of progress.

TruScholar’s Approach

TruScholar addresses this challenge by building a trusted digital credential and employability infrastructure that enables:

• institutions to issue tamper-proof, verifiable digital credentials
• learners to securely access and manage credentials through a digital wallet, including DigiLocker integration
• employers to verify credentials instantly and access trusted candidate information

Going beyond verification, TruScholar has also built an employability layer that helps convert static credentials into actionable career tools. These include:

• AI-powered resume builder
• ATS compatibility checker
• AI career coach for pathway and learning recommendations
• AI interview preparation tools

Through this integrated approach, TruScholar is working to transform credentials from passive records into active career enablers.

Growth and Milestones

TruScholar has already issued over 2 million credentials, with growing adoption across institutions and organisations.

Importantly, the company has built this growth on a profitable (PAT-positive) and sustainable business model.

The company has also been shortlisted for the Aadhaar Verifiable Credentials (VC) ID’athon organised by UIDAI, where only 6 startups out of 175 applicants were selected.

Adding to its thought leadership in the sector, TruScholar recently collaborated with The Economic Times Education to publish the journal:

“Roadmap for Future-Ready Campuses: Digitalization, Trust & Employability.”

This initiative reflects the company’s commitment not only to building products, but also to contributing to the broader dialogue on the future of education, digital trust, and employability.

Global Relevance

The need for trusted and outcome-driven credential infrastructure is not limited to India.

Over the past year, TruScholar has showcased its platform at major education and innovation forums across key international markets, including:

• London, UK – BETT
• USA – BadgeSummit, 1EdTech, and TiE Silicon Valley
• Dubai – GESS
• Hong Kong – Digital Universities Asia 2025

Across these markets, one clear insight has emerged:

• The demand for trusted, verifiable, and career-connected credential systems is universal.

Use of Funds

The newly raised capital will be deployed toward:

• strengthening go-to-market capabilities and pan-India expansion
• building deeper partnerships with institutions and enterprises
• advancing AI-powered employability offerings
• scaling TruScholar’s global credential infrastructure

Founders’ Vision

Founded in 2019 by CA Mayur Zanwar (Founder, CEO & CFO) and Samit Singhai (Founder & CTPO), TruScholar is building the digital trust layer connecting education, credentials, and careers.

What began as a blockchain-based credential verification solution has today evolved into a broader platform designed to help learners move from credential to career, while enabling institutions and employers to operate with greater trust, speed, and efficiency.

The founding team combines expertise across technology, compliance, education, and ecosystem building, with a shared focus on solving real-world challenges related to trust, employability, and digital transformation.

Acknowledgements

TruScholar acknowledges the support of its investors — SucSEED Indovation Fund, PadUp Ventures, Vinners, and angel investors from the TiE Global community — as well as ecosystem partners including TiE Global, NASSCOM, ISB Dlabs, ICAI, and GUSEC.

Looking Ahead

The future of education and employment will not be shaped by credentials alone, but by verifiable skills, trusted digital identities, and meaningful pathways to opportunity.

This funding round is more than a financial milestone for TruScholar.

It is a step toward building the trust infrastructure that the future of learning and hiring will increasingly depend on.

WazirX's Nishchal Shetty Co-founded Shardeum Raises $5.4 Mn from Amber Group, Galxe, J17 Capital, Others

Shardeum, an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) -based, linearly scalable smart contract platform, has raised $5.4 million in a strategic round from Amber Group, Galxe, J17 Capital, JSquare, TRGC and others.

The fresh funding, which ahead of its mainnet launch later this year, will be used to support the growth of its ecosystem.

The blockchain startup, co-founded by WazirX's Founder Nishchal Shetty, had earlier raised $18.2 million in a seed round at a valuation of $200 million from 60 prominent investors, in October last year. The investors in that round included Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, Foresight Ventures and others.

Shardeum's mainnet launch is expected in late this year. A mainnet refers to a fully developed and operational digital network that serves as the primary infrastructure for a particular blockchain project.

Founded last year, Shardeum is a layer-1 EVM-based, linearly scalable blockchain smart contract platform that provides low gas fees while maintaining true decentralization and solid security through dynamic state sharding. Shardeum uses sharding to increase TPS with the addition of every new node.

In an official blog announcement, Kelsey McGuire, Chief Growth Officer at Shardeum, said, "The completion of this strategic raise from key participants puts Shardeum in position to expand on our mission to cultivate a global and diverse community. Given Shardeum’s consensus design and use of dynamic state sharding, validator participation is highly accessible regardless of user access to computing resources. This raise allows us to continue to prioritize decentralization by growing our community of participants worldwide through education and other key Initiatives."

Shardeum will scale linearly thanks to dynamic state sharding. Every node that joins theShardeum network automatically raises the number of transactions per second (TPS), ensuring cheap transaction costs even as use grows.

As July 7, 2023, over 7.4 million transactions have taken place on the Shardeum testnet, with 820K+ accounts and over 230K contracts deployed.

Shardeum will have SHARD (SHM) as its token, which is in the development stage currently. 

Blockchain-Based Data Privacy Platform VeriSmart Acquires Conversational AI Communication Platform DolphinChat (Formerly CivilCops)

Blockchain-based Data Exchange Platform, VeriSmart has announced the acquisition of Delhi-based Conversational AI platform, DolphinChat (Formerly CivilCops). VeriSmart will be investing Four million US Dollars in the DolphinChat platform over the next 24 months. DolphinChat’s core team will be joining VeriSmart.

(L-R) Saurabh Gupta, Founder & CEO of VeriSmart & Ashish Sharma, Founder & CEEO, DolphinChat

“DolphinChat platform will get access to millions of consumers that are part of VeriSmart’s industry consortiums. VeriSmart is rapidly growing and DolphinChat will only strengthen their overall proposition to enterprises” said Ashish Sharma, Founder & CEO of DolphinChat (Formerly CivilCops).

DolphinChat (Formerly CivilCops) launched in 2017 by Ashish Sharma and Kusha Kohli with backing from Orbit Startups (SOSV) and angel investors Dhianu Das & Dr. Ritesh Malik, develops AI-based Chatbots and Voice Assistants for enterprises & SMBs. The platform has onboarded United Nations, D2C eCommerce brands, State Governments, Banks & Telecoms as customers. People are habitual to interacting with each other over messaging apps. Consumers expect the same behaviour when interacting with businesses. DolphinChat provides new-age contextual assistants to businesses that provide more meaningful automated consumer conversations.

Founded by Saurabh Gupta, VeriSmart is on a mission to help organizations to realize the true potential of their data along with ensuring end-user privacy. VeriSmart is an end-to-end Identity & Data Access Management Platform that is working with the top Banks & Telecoms in India like Kotak Mahindra Bank, ICICI Bank, Union Bank, and Bharti Airtel. The company has seen a growth of 450% in the Monthly Net Revenue over the last 3 quarters and is now planning expansion to two more geographies.

Commenting on the same Saurabh Gupta, Founder & CEO of VeriSmart added “VeriSmart is creating infrastructure for super apps with our Industry Consortiums by enabling businesses to interact with each other in a privacy-compliant manner. This enables end consumers to get a multitude of products and services through the existing service providers. The integration of DolphinChat’s omnichannel communication layer will help extend VeriSmart’s functionality to manage end-consumer consent for data use in our Data Exchange Consortiums more efficiently. I am confident that integration of DolphinChat with VeriSmart is going to create an end-to-end solution for enterprises as well as the end consumers”.

VeriSmart has bootstrapped to profitability over the last two years and has already connected the data of fifteen million consumers to its various Data Exchange Consortiums. VeriSmart is powering more than 500,000 daily transactions with 6 million USD in transactions each month.

“This acquisition marks a major milestone not only for VeriSmart but also for the real-world applications of blockchain technology, enabling enterprises to harness the true potential of blockchain and data. Having worked with both companies since their early days, we are excited about this development and can’t wish for a better team to deliver on this mission,” said William Bao Bean, Managing Director of Orbit Startups.

ABOUT VERISMART

Modern digital transformation has made data a key asset in our data-driven economy, but most of the data is trapped in proprietary silos. Enterprise data sharing is the need of the hour to protect user privacy abuse, increase business profits and enhance user experience and create a new lead business model.

VeriSmart is a blockchain-based data exchange platform that enables businesses to exchange their data with each other in a privacy-compliant manner, helping enterprises retain data ownership and protect their users from third party data abuse. VeriSmart platform tracks who shared what data with whom, when, by what means & for what purpose, without storing any user data on the platform. The platform helps businesses to create a recurring revenue model by monetizing their data with other enterprises and third parties on a subscription basis.

Blockchain Network 5ire Turns Unicorn with Latest $100 Mn Series A Funding at Valuation of $1.5 Bn

L to R- Prateek Dwivedi - Co-founder & CMO, Pratik Gauri - Co-founder & CEO and Vilma Mattila - Co-founder & CBO

• 5ire, has received funding from UK-based conglomerate SRAM & MRAM to become the fastest growing blockchain unicorn in India and the only sustainable blockchain unicorn in the world.
• Brainchild of India-origin founders, Pratik Gauri and Prateek Dwivedi

5ire, a fifth generation level 1 blockchain network and the world’s first and only sustainable blockchain, today announced that it has raised $100 million in Series A funding from UK-based conglomerate SRAM & MRAM. This investment makes 5ire the fastest growing blockchain unicorn in India and the only sustainable blockchain unicorn in the world, valued at $1.5 billion. 5ire was founded by Indian-origin entrepreneurs, Pratik Gauri and Prateek Dwivedi, along with web3 financier Vilma Mattila, in August 2021.

The funds raised will be used for business expansion and extending 5ire’s footprint across three continents including Asia, North America and Europe, with India as the hub of operations and core area of focus. 5ire will continue to invest in strengthening its blockchain further and work towards ensuring this decentralised technology benefits a larger base globally. Additionally, 5ire aims to hire the best talent in the industry across functions like product, engineering, marketing etc.

5ire had earlier raised a funding of $21 million in its seed round at a valuation of $110 million with participation from both private and institutional investors like Alphabit, Marshland Capital, Launchpool Labs, Moonrock Capital, and amongst many other investors.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Sailesh Lachu Hiranandani, Chairman of the SRAM & MRAM group, said, “We have great confidence in moving forward with investments in sustainable technologies. As a scientist, I have always believed in finding better ways to do things, and 5ire is committed to finding solutions for the 17 UN Sustainability Development Goals. We are assured in the abilities of the leadership team at 5ire and wish them all the very best.”

Pratik Gauri, CEO and Founder of 5ire said, “We are on a mission to embed sustainability into blockchain and shift the current paradigm from ‘for-profit’ to ‘for-benefit’. The 5ire team has worked round-the-clock to develop a platform that combines both technology and processes for the benefit of humankind. Becoming the world’s first and only sustainable unicorn born out of India, in just 11 months, is testimony that we are on the right path. We are humbled by the trust shown in 5ire by the SRAM & MRAM group and thrilled to find a partner who also wants to promote the transition of the world from the 4th Industrial Revolution to the 5th Industrial Revolution.”

5ire is a blockchain ecosystem that brings forth Sustainability, Technology & Innovation to build the 5th industrial revolution (5IR). The mission of the 5ire ecosystem is to embed the for-benefit paradigm at the heart of blockchain, by highly incentivizing practices that align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), therefore facilitating the transition from the 4IR to 5IR. 5ire empowers decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and working groups to help accelerate the implementation of the UN’s 17 SDG goals. It assures openness, unity of purpose, and inclusivity. Thus, shaping the ethics of business and collaborations toward sustainability while providing a cross-chain environment as well as advanced governance and rewarding mechanisms for participants.

5ire is a blockchain ecosystem that focuses on sustainability, technology and innovation to build the 5th industrial revolution (5IR). Founded by blockchain proponents Pratik Gauri, Prateek Dwivedi and Vilma Mattila in August 2021, the missions of the 5ire ecosystem are to embed a for-benefit paradigm at the heart of blockchain, highly incentivise practices that align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), facilitate the transition from the 4IR to 5IR, and accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The company’s primary offering is 5ireChain, a first layer, sustainability-driven 5th generation blockchain that ensures adherence to the philosophy of 5IR, creating a net positive impact on the planet and service humanity. For further information, visit its website at https://www.5ire.org .

About SRAM & MRAM Group:

SRAM & MRAM Group is the brainchild of Dr. Sailesh Lachu Hiranandani, and founded in 1995. Chairman Dr. Sailesh Lachu Hiranandani, holds a Ph.D in Financial Management from UK, is a visionary with a steadfast background in Financial and Risk management in Hedge Funds and Forex Managements. His career started with commodity trading in India and Cambodia and gradually entered FX hedging and rollovers from Tokyo, Hongkong and Singapore. During this time, the world currency markets were rapidly fluctuating and he wanted a reliable system to manage the USD against GBP, EURO and JPY. This led to his acquiring considerable skills in both Financial and the Information Technology market.

Assisted by an able team of Information Technology and Forex associates, he set up what is today, after two decades, a global conglomerate with 8 international alliances, 10 companies,5 continents, 35+ locations, 300+ employees with a sales turnaround of USD 800 Million (FY 2017-2018). The corporation is headquartered in Edinburgh, United Kingdom with branch offices in Cambodia, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bahrain, Georgia, India and Bangladesh. For further information, please visit https://srammram.com.

Cypher Capital Allocates $5 Million Fund To Invest in Ocean Protocol Ecosystem Projects

Cypher Capital Allocates $5 Million Fund To Invest in Ocean Protocol Ecosystem Projects

Cypher Capital, a venture capital firm located in the UAE, today announced that it has set up an ecosystem fund together with Ocean Protocol according to which it will be allocating $5 million to invest in Ocean Protocol projects. Ocean Protocol is a platform for data exchange and monetization that builds on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains. Ocean Protocol is available on WazirX, India's Most Trusted Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Exchange.

The open-source protocol facilitates the exchange and monetization of data and data-based services, allowing people to buy and share information securely while preserving privacy. Ocean Protocol makes use of "datatokens" to give businesses and individuals access to data, where tokens can be redeemed to access information.

Ocean Protocol aims to build a new Data Economy powered by a dynamic group of builders and start-ups. So far, over 150 projects have been funded via OceanDAO and Shipyard programs to encourage and support grassroots innovation. Projects like Algovera, DataUnion, Data Whale, DataX, Felt, Ocean Pearl, Swash and Transport Genie are some of the many funded initiatives that are now positioned as catalysts for Ocean's wide scale adoption. Created by an Indian Founder, Manan Patel, DataX aims to further the growth of Ocean ecosystem through innovative DeFi tooling for datasets.

Bijan Alizadeh, Co-Founder and Partner of Cypher Capital, stated, "We are so excited to be investing in projects together with Ocean Protocol. We will support data marketplaces backed by top-tier corporations that are integrating Ocean Protocol into their data-driven business models and building applications tailored for data services through the Ocean Protocol platform."

Cypher Capital's investment team will review and evaluate Ocean Protocol's proposals, off of which decisions will be made. The $5 million investment will be spread out across 20 projects over 24 months, or two or three investments of a minimum of a quarter-million each per quarter if a project is highly recommended by the Ocean Protocol team.

Vineet Budki, Managing Partner and CEO of Cypher Capital said, "We are thrilled to be the enablers of the rising Data Economy. Our interests are aligned with the mission of Ocean Protocol as it creates an inclusive, secure, decentralized data exchange platform for publishers and consumers across the globe. We look forward to the enhanced role of data and AI in solving global issues through equal opportunities to access and harness data."

Manan Patel, Founder, DataX added, "Ocean Protocol has a growing ecosystem of interesting projects ready to disrupt the Data/AI industry. Being initially funded by OceanDAO and as an integral part of Ocean's ecosystem, DataX is at the forefront to lead the Data Ownership and Data Finance narrative and is well-positioned to help scale Ocean's efforts in unlocking the true value of data and promoting data privacy and ownership. And, we will see significant growth in these efforts in the Indian market. India is strategically relevant here because of its ever-growing digital user base and fastest-growing Web 3.0 talent pool. Like DataX, I believe, we will see more projects arising out of the Indian Web 3.0 market, expanding Ocean's footprint in India."

Ocean Protocol Founder Bruce Pon commented: "Cypher Capital's commitment to invest in the Ocean Protocol ecosystem is a recognition of the potential of a new Data Economy and Ocean's leading role in the space. The Ocean ecosystem has generated a pipeline of promising projects which are nearing viability for seed funding. Meanwhile, Cypher Capital brings deep connections with the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia ecosystem that projects can leverage to springboard forward. With Dubai accelerating its push to be the node for global crypto-innovation, Cypher Capital's extensive resources, and the innovation emanating from the Ocean community, we're excited to see the next wave of adoption focused on data."

Ocean Protocol is spearheading the move to unlock a new Data Economy by breaking down data silos and making quality data accessible. Ocean's marketplace technology allows data to be published, discovered, and consumed in a secure, privacy-preserving manner. Ocean helps to give data owners the comfort and safety to share and monetize data without losing control.

With a hands-on approach of nurturing start-ups in their initial phase, Cypher Capital has played an important role in the growth of successful crypto and blockchain start-ups including Kilt Protocol, Sheesha Finance, PAID Network, Splinterlands, CasperLabs, Matterless Studios, Prasaga, AukiLabs and Cross The Ages.

Cypher Capital is building a 10,000 sq. ft. hub for crypto start-ups which is set to open in Q4 2022 in Jumeirah Beach Residence, Dubai. The hub reflects the company's commitment to the blockchain community and its vision to provide mentorship and guidance to its members in all matters relating to their projects.

Cypher Capital is a venture capital firm based in the UAE focused on crypto, blockchain, and digital asset-related projects worldwide. Cypher Capital takes a holistic approach in creating an ecosystem in which crypto, blockchain, and digital asset-related projects can thrive under the mentorship and relationships that Cypher Capital has to offer. The venture capital firm has recently announced a $100 million seed fund aimed at investing in such projects.

Telangana Govt, Coinswitch and Lumos Labs Shortlist 14 Web3 Startups for India Blockchain Accelerator

The India Blockchain Accelerator has shortlisted 14 early-stage Web3 startups for the final evaluation round for its first-ever mentorship and financing program. Launched in December 2021 as a joint initiative of the Government of Telangana, CoinSwitch, India’s largest Crypto investing app, and Lumos Labs, an innovation management firm, the accelerator provides a $700K grant pool, go-to-market support, and mentorship.

The India Blockchain Accelerator is one of the first state-supported programs aimed at supporting and equipping deep-tech blockchain startups in India, and received over 270 registrations from Indian and global startups. The 14 shortlisted startups will get an opportunity to fine-tune their business idea in the evaluation stage and engage with the Government of Telangana, CoinSwitch and the investment partners.

Five best-rated startups will present their solutions to the investors on the Demo Day to stand a chance at receiving accreditation by the Govt. of Telangana, incubation space, go-to-market support, expert mentorship, and grant from a prize pool of $700K from investment partners Lightspeed and Woodstock Fund, contingent on due diligence and investment thesis fit.

“In line with its vision to be a leader in emerging technologies, the Government of Telangana has taken up several initiatives to develop a conducive ecosystem for the industry in the State. Realizing the potential of Blockchain technology, the government, with industry leaders, hope to provide opportunities to the participating startups to pilot their solution in Telangana so that they can enhance their solution and further contribute to the accelerating Indian technology sector.” Jayesh Ranjan,Principal Secretary, ITE&C and Industries, Govt of Telangana commented.

“We are pleased to announce the shortlist of The India Blockchain Accelerator. Blockchain has immense real-world utility and can solve many of India’s problems, be it in healthcare, infrastructure, logistics or finance. We are honored to support the Government of Telangana’s vision to become the Blockchain Capital of the World and play an active role in building a robust Web3 ecosystem of cutting-edge technologies and companies in India, for the world,” said Ashish Singhal, Co-founder and CEO, CoinSwitch.

“Through the period of this program it has been fascinating to see the spirit of innovation at the very grassroot stage. We are excited for the innovation these fifteen startups have presented and the possibilities that these provide for future solutions to come from this ecosystem.” added Kaavya Prasad, Co-founder, Lumos Labs

Blockchain is fast-emerging as a transformative technology with the potential to reshape businesses and the internet for the better. With India being one of the fastest-growing and digitizing economies, investors are aggressively infusing capital into blockchain and Web3 startups in India. Last year, Indian Crypto and blockchain startups raised over $600 million from global investors, an increase of more than 15 times from the $37 million raised in 2020. Capital and mentorship from proven investors and industry leaders, experts say, can guide India’s deep talent pool to create world-class blockchain solutions in the country and make India a global Web3 hub.

The shortlisted startups are:

1. Whrrl
2. Print2Block
3. Emertech Innovations Pvt. Ltd
4. Blockster Labs Private Limited
5. The-Ally
6. Karpine
7. BirthVenue
8. Autify Network
9. The Indian Art Revolution (TIAR)
10. Eventozo
11. Nibiaa Devices Pvt.Ltd.
12. MentorPlus (M+)
13. Konct
14. NFTready.tech

These startups provide blockchain use-cases in Fintech, Entertainment, Sustainability, Infrastructure and Tooling, Agritech, Logistics, and Healthcare.

The India Blockchain Accelerator was launched in December, 2021 by Lumos Labs, a technology innovation management firm, in partnership with CoinSwitch and the Government of Telangana. The accelerator is further supported by global industry players Nervos Network, Stellar, Streamr, Filecoin, Polygon, Aeternity Blockchain and Neo Protocol as platinum sponsors, investment partners Lightspeed, Woodstock Fund, Jsquare, DFG, Fracton and Brinc, incubation partner Buidlers Tribe, program partners Blockchain District Hyderabad, Guwahati Biotech Park, an Assam government led platform dedicated to accelerating entrepreneurship and technological development in Northeast India, and Microsoft for Startups, and technology partner Sixpep.

About Telangana Blockchain District:

Blockchain district, anchored by the Government of Telangana, brings together different facets of the Blockchain technology realm including Tech companies, research organizations, academic institutions, startups, investors, enablers, and user groups & communities under one umbrella. The collaboration has been encouraged by the Government of Telangana to promote the use of Blockchain technology in the state and to foster the growth of the industry as a whole with IIIT – Hyderabad, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and Tech Mahindra as the Founding Members too.

For more details, visit - https://blockchaindistrict.telangana.gov.in/

About CoinSwitch

CoinSwitch is on a mission to Make Money Equal for All. India’s largest Crypto investing app and a Great Place to Work, CoinSwitch is creating an ecosystem that simplifies Crypto and is trusted by over 15 million registered users. Founded in 2017 by Ashish Singhal, Govind Soni, and Vimal Sagar Tiwari, and backed by blue chip investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Paradigm, and Coinbase Ventures, the company is evolving into a wealth-tech destination for every Indian.

Blockchain-powered Agritech Platform TraceX Raises $1Mn Funding Led by NABARD-backed NABVENTURES Fund

Founders Anil Nadig and Srivatsa Sreenivasarao (From L to R)

The round also saw participation from Paipal Ventures and angel investor Sunil Kumar 

TraceX Technologies, a blockchain powered agritech platform that enhances supply chain traceability and transparency, has raised USD 1 million in pre-series A funding led by NABARD backed NABVENTURES Fund. The round also saw participation from Paipal Ventures, an early stage family office investment fund, and from angel investor Sunil Kumar. The newly raised capital will be used towards scaling up operations across geographies in India and in international markets, enhancing the technology platform, foraying into other value chains and for building high performance teams across functions. 

Founded in 2019 by Srivatsa Sreenivasarao and Anil Nadig, TraceX harnesses the power of blockchain technology to build clean, transparent, and traceable supply chains across the food and agriculture ecosystem. 

A report published by Markets and Markets indicates that the food traceability market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.1% with its estimated value reaching USD 26.1 Billion by 2025.  Increasing consumer awareness on safe food products, growing demand for healthy and ethically sourced products, and focus on transparency are some of the reasons behind this demand. Transparency and traceability are the two key pillars to building consumer trust. TraceX was founded with an aim to create connected and traceable supply chains to provide accountability and transparency for every stakeholder in the supply chain. 

In addition to building trust among consumers, TraceX also offers a significant value add to farmers and food and agri businesses. For farmers, it helps boost productivity, improve market linkages and enhance the quality of the produce. On the other hand, it helps food companies conform to regulatory compliances, reduce losses due to wastage, better  inventory management, and  timely product recalls in case of contamination. 

Commenting on the fundraise, Anil Nadig, Co-Founder, TraceX, said, “Traceability is more relevant today than ever before. More and more consumers are keen to know about the origins of the food they buy, the processes it undergoes and the journey it takes before it reaches them. Due to the opacity in supply chains, consumers today have no way to trace and track the products they buy. Traceability in the supply-chain bridges the information and trust gap among consumers, agri-businesses, and farmers. At TraceX, we believe that transparency builds trust and we are on a mission to create credible, connected and sustainable supply chains for the world. We are thrilled to have NABVENTURES join us on our journey. Their tremendous experience in the field of food and agriculture will help us accelerate our vision of building a globally connected food network on blockchain.”

Commenting on the future of food traceability, Dr. G. R. Chintala, Chairman of NABARD and NABVENTURES, said, “Traceability is the future of Indian agriculture. Leveraging technology to showcase transparency will allow farmers and FPOs to command a premium for their produce. Traceability solutions empower farmers to follow sustainable climate resilient practices ensuring continuous productivity."

TraceX’s SaaS platform integrates with the existing digital infrastructure in the supply chains and brings all the stakeholders onto the blockchain network, ensuring a single source of truth from farm to fork. In addition to food safety and operational efficiency, TraceX also helps companies build sustainable supply chains for the future.

Speaking about the investment, Rajesh Ranjan, CEO, NABVENTURES, said, "A typical  agri-food supply chain is unorganized, and the data is stored in silos. This results in a disconnected supply chain, limited interoperability and compromised transparency across transactions. Given the increasing demand for providing credibility to claims made by brands on sustainable sourcing, food handling and other aspects, TraceX is the right platform - neutral, independent, and a credible solution for building traceable supply chains  from farm to fork. It organizes the entire supply chain by providing connected, secured, auditable and verifiable information via blockchain."

TraceX currently has a B2B SaaS subscription model where it works with companies across livestock, poultry, seafood, and agri supply chains. The startup currently works with 30+ food companies that include prominent names such as Olam, MTR Foods, Slay Coffee, Govt of Telangana, GoDesi, BlueTokai, Sam Agri, Milk Mantra and many others.

Commenting on the company’s future plans, Srivatsa Sreenivasarao, CEO and Co-founder, said, "We have received an overwhelming response from our customers for the kind of positive impact our product has created. We are working towards further enhancing our product by leveraging Asset Tokenization (NFTs), AI, ML, IoT to provide digital empowerment to all the participants in the supply chain. Our aim is to  harness the power of Web3 technologies to build a large  distributed autonomous supply chain network for food and agriculture businesses. Over the next few months, we plan to extend our offerings to encompass carbon offsets and climate action goals of companies. We also plan to aggressively scale up operations in international geographies."

TraceX is a next generation digital agriculture platform that leverages blockchain to connect multiple participants across the food and agri supply chain and help them securely exchange verifiable and auditable data leading to mutual trust, accountability, traceability and transparency amongst the participating actors.

Their solution enables farmers, producer organizations, aggregators, food processors, insurance providers, credit providers, logistics providers, buyers etc to exchange information with mutual trust via a permissioned blockchain digital ledger enabling each one to prove transparency, traceability and provenance of the claims. Farmers, Processors, Procurement folks use their multilingual mobile application and others use web-based applications to interact with the system.

Website: https://tracextech.com/ 

About NABVENTURES Fund

NABVENTURES is backed by National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), the apex development finance institution of India with an AUM of USD 95 billion.   

NABVENTURES is a venture growth equity fund that invests in food, agritech, and rural fintech. The fund has invested in 9 startups: Jai Kisan (2 rounds), Unnati (2 rounds), TenderCuts (2 rounds), Eggoz, VilCart, KrishiTantra, Satyukt, TraceX and Fraazo(exited). 

Apart from providing patient capital, NABVENTURES focuses on operational value additions and leverages the NABARD network and subsidiaries to provide market access, debt, and strategic advice to its portfolio companies. 

Blockchain Startup Kandola Raises USD 450K in a Pre-Seed Round, Funding Led by Arcanum Capital, AlphaWave Global and Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal

Business Wire India

Blockchain startup Kandola, which offers a real-time decentralized chip-to-cloud IoT protocol and real-time NFT, has raised a pre-seed round of $450K from a marquee list of investors including AlphaWave Global, Sandeep Nailwal (founder of Polygon), Harsh Rawat (EPNS) among others. The funding round also witnessed participation from Arcanum Capital, a seed-stage VC firm focused on investments in decentralized protocols and applications for the global blockchain ecosystem.

It aims to be the de facto platform for all Dapps/solutions that need to use real-time communication and data stores like IoT hardware and apps, messaging apps, games, real-time NFT, and metaverse apps.

The funds from this round will be used to solidify underlying technologies through research and development, and for team expansion. Founded by Siddharth Banerjee along with co-founders Krithika Radhakrishnan and Sriram Padmanabhan, Kandola’s key objective for this funding round is to build a strong community to ensure easy adoption and to launch TestNet with its existing partners in the next six months.
 
Speaking about the startup’s objective, Siddharth Banerjee, CEO of Kandola said, “With immense belief in the rapidly growing Web3 community, we hope to attract aspiring talent who will help us build Kandola ground up. We are already on course for a paradigm shift. Data being controlled and monetized by the owner is obvious and yet ambitious; any company working towards making this possible will be a part of an ongoing meta revolution.”
 
Ragul Kumar, chief technology officer of Kandola said, “Kandola is building an IoT3 Network which will perform real-time transactions and finality at unprecedented scale for all non-DeFi business domains on Web3. We provide all actors with simple tools and mechanisms to participate in this decentralized network. We will deliver this value to IoT devices, manufacturers, and consumers as proof of our vision. We plan to expand this success to all businesses where there is a trust deficit between what is produced, processed, and delivered to consumers. Once in motion, we envision a steady power shift from centralized enterprises to the true owners, the value creators.”

India is being seen as the next major global hub for blockchain technology growth. According to an article in Analytics Insight, around 56 percent of Indian businesses are currently shifting towards blockchain technology, making it an integral part of their core business. Blockchain technology and Web 3.0 innovations are estimated to propel the digital asset economy’s value from $5 billion in 2021 to $262 billion over 11 years, resulting in a $1.1 trillion contribution to India’s GDP. Such is going to be the impact of blockchain technology. Kandola aims to be a key part of this revolution.
 
Speaking about the funding, Tushar Behl from AlphaWave Global said, "We are extremely excited to partner with Sid and his team at Kandola. We are big believers in the power of permaweb and decentralized infrastructure. At the same time, IoT and smart devices have taken over our world. Kandola has a real shot at building a critical piece of that infrastructure for one of the largest TAMs in human history!"

James McDowall from Arcanum Capital said, “The Kandola team brings a wealth of expertise and experience from the Web 2.0 IoT world and in our opinion have chosen the right time to innovate by applying Web 3.0 technologies to IoT. With a pre-existing client base and a solid vision of where the sector is evolving, Arcanum Capital is confident Kandola will become a leader in the field.”

Indian Origin Entrepreneurs' 5ire Beats Meta (Facebook), Sandbox to Win ‘Social Impact Project of the Year’ Award

5ire Won The AWARD Beating Out Names Like Meta (formerly Facebook), and Sandbox

5ire, a 5th generation blockchain network founded by two entrepreneurs of Indian origin today announced it has won the AIBC Asia's ‘Social Impact Project of the Year’ award, beating industry giants like Meta and Sandbox.

Underlying the importance of social impact, AIBC stated, "The stronger our ties develop, the more powerful blockchain becomes. Because mass adoption initiatives are critical to the global infrastructure, the Social Impact Project of the Year award will recognize projects that are utilizing blockchain technologies and, as a result, boost adoption and strengthen the community as a whole."

The win was especially significant as 5ire, which was founded just a year ago in 2021, also beat industry giants like Carbon.Fi and Excel.

5ire's CEO and Co-founder Pratik Gauri said this was a significant recognition of the organization’s standing as the first sustainable level 1 blockchain and is a testimony to the market confidence in its offerings.

"This is a humbling moment for the founding team, as this shows that we are on the right track. Our commitment to the UN's 17 SDGs and our mission to solve those challenges by 2030 is being hailed as a crucial tenet for the future," he said.

Prateek Dwivedi, 5ire's CMO and co-founder added, "I am truly humbled and have been given the mandate for finding synergies in how we further promote our vision of 'For-benefit' ventures in the 5ire ecosystem to transition the world from 4th Industrial Revolution to 5th Industrial Revolution, meet the 2030 SDGs and beyond. I feel that sustainability is not a one-time phenomenon, but a consistent development benchmark here on forward."

5ire's CBO and co-founder Vilma Mattila said sustainable development is estimated to be a $20 - 30 billion dollar market in 2022 that is slated to grow to as much as $50 billion by 2030.

5ire has been working on the UN's Sustainability goals and partnering with nations across three continents as the first step in this direction. By signing MOUs, 5ire has taken the first step in the public-private partnerships in India, Nigeria, and the United States to bring their technological solutions for sustainability, better governance, more just and transparent law enforcement, and more.

The award ceremony was held in Dubai on March 20.

5ire is a blockchain ecosystem that brings sustainability, Technology & Innovation to build the 5th industrial revolution (5IR). Founded by Pratik Gauri, Prateek Dwivedi, and Vilma Mattila, proponents of blockchain technology, in August 2021, the mission of the 5ire ecosystem is to embed the for-benefit paradigm at the heart of the blockchain, highly incentivize practises that align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), facilitate the transition from the 4IR to 5IR and accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The company's primary offering is 5ireChain, a first layer, sustainability-driven 5th generation blockchain that ensures adherence to the philosophy of 5IR, creating a net positive impact on the planet and serving humanity.

Blockchain-based Open Source Software Maker Tea Raises $8 Mn in Funding Led by Binance Labs

Tea Raises $8 Million Led by Binance Labs to Create New Open Source Software on the Blockchain

Tea, a new company building an open source software platform on the blockchain, today announced an $8 million dollar seed funding round led by Binance Labs, the venture capital and innovation incubator of Binance, the world's leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider.

Open source has been foundational for the Internet, underpinning everything online for more than twenty-five years. Tea Co-Founder and CEO Max Howell created the open-source software package management system Homebrew, also known as “brew,” which grew into the most contributed‐to open source software program in the world. Homebrew has been used by tens of millions of developers worldwide and has served as the backbone for the largest technology corporations to build their products without directly contributing to its development. 

Tools like Homebrew are uniquely placed, underneath all developer tools, and thus can manage a fair and equitable transfer of value to the entire open source ecosystem. Tea represents a substantial evolution of traditional open source software, creating a new category in which these volunteer developers are compensated and involved in open governance. 

Tea controls the graph of open source that underpins all modern digital infrastructure. Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included. As developers use Tea, governance tokens are available according to their actual, real‐life usage in order to drive the entire open source ecosystem.

“Web 2.0 accrued fortunes on the backs of free labor by unpaid open source volunteers,” said co-founder Max Howell. “web3 has the power to change this. There is so much that can be done in this space that nobody has tried before. Tea is an approachable, intuitive collection of tools that will work with both Web 2.0's Internet of today along with web3.”

Tea is decentralized at the day-to-day development and installation layers, which increases reliability and provides a native, built-in “version management” for every tool in the stack. Tea's decentralization also offers tangible benefits to ecosystem security. Every layer of apps and dapps is signed and verified on‐chain.

"We’re not changing the nature of open source. It’s still free,” explained co-founder Timothy Lewis. “Software wants to be free, but programmers need to be compensated. We’re bringing the creator economy to open source. Our vision is to fix how open source is funded and create the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity."

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs, said, “We are excited to support Max, Tim and team, as part of our overall investment push into the infrastructure levers that shift Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. We believe the Tea team has the potential to introduce new paradigms that allow open source compensation without direct payment. The platform can solve a core problem for the open-source software development community by utilizing of the key value proposition of decentralized token economies."

This funding will be used by Tea Inc. to hire additional resources to continue work on the protocol, software, and the development of the community. Additional funding participants include XBTO, Lattice Capital, Darma Capital, Coral Capital, Woodstock, Rocktree, SVK, and MAKE services. 

To learn more, visit https://tea.xyz.

About Tea Inc.

Tea Inc. is a Puerto Rico-based corporation that is building the open source toolkit that makes development possible and builds the internet: it’s “brew2 for web3”. Developers can work on any platform, CI/CD on any platform, deploy on any platform; Tea abstracts this detail away so developers can get on with the work that matters. Those interested in joining the team fixing how open source is funded and creating the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity should reach out on Discord or GitHub. 

Airtel Acquires Stake in Aqilliz, A Blockchain-based MediaTech Startup

Indian Telecommunication giant, Bharti Airtel ('Airtel'), has acquired a strategic stake in Singapore-based Aqilliz via its "Airtel Startup Accelerator Program".  Aqilliz is essentially a blockchain-enabled MediaTech startup offering a new age middleware technology for the media marketplace and create a more collaborative digital marketing environment.

Airtel has launched its Startup Accelerator Program in 2019, which seeks to support early-stage startups that will contribute to the growth of Digital India, by offering financial backing, networking, and mentorship.

Aqilliz has developed a patented hybrid blockchain platform called ‘Atom' that integrates differential privacy and federated learning on a distributed digital ledger. Aqilliz's Atom allows brands to create secure and consent-based solutions to engage with customers in a rapidly-evolving digital economy that's becoming increasingly decentralized. 

With this acquisition, Airtel will be deploying Aqilliz’s solutions across its Adtech (Airtel Ads), Digital Entertainment (Wynk Music & Airtel Xstream) and Digital Marketplace (Airtel Thanks App) offerings.

Whereas, Aqilliz will be able to benefit from Airtel’s online and offline distribution network, while giving us the opportunity to deploy our MAdtech offerings at scale to the conglomerate’s over 340 million retail customers and over 1 million business partners. 

Aqilliz has also co-created an NFT marketplace called 'WishWorld', a music and entertainment-focused NFT marketplace that enable fans to engage directly with celebrities in the metaverse. 

made for the entertainment and music creators. WishWorld enables avid fans to interact directly with their favourite creators, imbuing virtual experiences with real-world value.

Airtel, through its accelerator program, has acquired stake in Vahan, an AI-based job matchmaker between employers & job seekers.

SOURCE - Airtel.in

Binance Labs Concludes Season 3 of Incubation Program with a Virtual BUIDLer Day

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and innovation incubator of Binance, the world’s leading blockchain and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider, has today announced a ‘BUIDLer Day’ to conclude another successful season of its incubation program. Now in its third season, the Binance Labs Incubation Program focuses on discovering and supporting the most promising founders and blockchain projects worldwide.

Bill Chin, the Head of Binance Labs Fund, said: “The Binance Labs Incubation Program nurtures budding entrepreneurs that can bring mass adoption of crypto and innovation within the blockchain ecosystem. Participating projects gain access to dedicated resources, industry exposure, valuable networks, and mentorship. Through the Incubation Program, we hope to help future industry key players develop and find their product market fit in the global blockchain landscape. Now that Season 3 is approaching the end, we are actively recruiting for Season 4 of the Incubation Program.”

Launched in 2018, the Binance Labs Incubation Program has incubated 25 projects. The first two seasons of the Incubation Program have produced leading and well-positioned blockchain projects, including Polygon, Perpetual Protocol, Dune Analytics and more.

Season 3 of the Incubation Program began in November 2021, and will conclude on January 25, 2022 with a BUIDLer Day. After 8 weeks of incubation, the BUIDLer Day would allow the nine incubation projects to formally pitch their progress and traction to an audience of investors, mentors and other industry figures. Unlike in past seasons, this invite-only pitch event will be held virtually for Season 3.

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs, said: “The third season of the Incubation Program saw talented projects coming from different sectors, such as gaming, NFTs, DeFi, trading platform, and more. BUIDLer Day will be the perfect opportunity for the projects to showcase their growth to prominent global investors. We believe that all nine projects have the potential to push the blockchain industry forward in meaningful ways."

The nine projects that were selected and participated in Season 3 of the Incubation Program are Mint Club, Raydius, GAT Network, Wombat Exchange, Tranching Protocol, SkyArk Studio, Bird, Copycat Finance, and Block Ape Scissors.

To enrich the Incubation Program experience, Binance Labs invited mentors from various backgrounds and expertise. The regular weekly fireside chat sessions were joined by Binance CEO CZ, CMO He Yi, Polygon Co-Founder Sandeep Nailwal, Zokyo CEO Hartej Sawhney, CertiK Co-Founder Prof. Ronghui Gu, BBS CEO Eyal Hertzog, and Animoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu.

Throughout the Incubation Program, the incubation projects also had individual sessions with Lisa Wu (Sky Consulting), Rudy Koch (Mythical Games), Leo (Capstone), Kinsey Cronin (TRM Labs), Aniket Jindal (Biconomy), Veronica Wang (SafePal), and Cryan Pellegrino (LayerZero). The whole Binance team also actively got involved in the development of the incubation projects, with 12 internal mentors from Binance Labs, Binance Smart Chain, Binance Research, Binance NFT, and CorpDev.

Application for Season 4 of the Binance Labs Incubation Program is open and available here.

To Accelerate Early-Age Blockchain Startups, India Accelerator and IBA Launch Blockstart Hackathon 2021

IA and IBA have partnered to launch an entrepreneurship program exclusively for Blockchain startups

The applications will be open from 15th November 2021 till 5th December 2021.

India Accelerator (IA) - India’s only seed accelerator program with Global Accelerator Network partners with IBA (India Blockchain Alliance) to launch BlockStart Hackathon 2021 – an entrepreneurship program to accelerate early-stage Blockchain startups.

Indian startups are capitalizing on innovation in Blockchain technology. The startup ecosystem is witnessing improved digital infrastructure with a vibrant pool of tech talent which further gives a strong push to Blockchain technology to become a global forerunner. Given the emergence and adoption rate of Blockchain technology in the present world, IA and IBA have come up with BlockStart Hackathon 2021 to spotlight the next wave of Blockchain Entrepreneurs in association with IA Labs as the virtual pitch day tech partner for the event.

The theme of the blockchain hackathon is to help India's journey towards AtmaNirbhar Bharat which includes existing opportunities and use cases in the areas of HealthCare, e-Governance, Agriculture and Finance. “This hackathon will help us further accelerate building the Blockchain ecosystem for India – Block by Block!”, said Raj Kapoor – Founder & Chairman of India BlockChain Alliance.

Commenting on the program, Maninder Singh, CTO & Co-founder of IA Labs said, “Our collaboration with IBA is in sync with our vision to accelerate Blockchain startups in India. IBA and IA have a strong network of mentors to help students and aspiring entrepreneurs drive innovation in Blockchain technology.”

“Web3 Blockchain DApps will be the next wave of disruption which will propel the Indian startup ecosystem towards the realization of SDG goals”, he added.

The campus entrepreneurship program is open for students, university teams, individuals and existing startups. As part of the program, IA and IBA will focus on nurturing the startups while making them industry-ready and opening more avenues for them to disrupt the market.

The call for program applications have opened on 15th November’ 21 and will close on 5th December’ 21 with a final demo day on 15th December’ 21. The final demo day will be followed by existing cash prizes, credits and perks along with an opportunity for funding and mentorship with the best in the industry.

Under the program, IA and IBA are projecting to accelerate 15 blockchain startups in [2021-22].

Forte Closes Additional $725 Million in Funding to Extend Its Lead in Building a Compliant, Interoperable Blockchain Gaming Platform

Business Wire India

Forte, a leading provider of blockchain solutions for game publishers, announced today that it has secured an additional $725 million in financing, closing its Series B. The Series B was led by Sea Capital and Kora Management with further support and funding from powerhouse game and media publishers including Animoca Brands, Big Bets (Huuuge Games), Overwolf, Playstudios, Warner Music Group, zVentures (Razer), and blockchain partners Cosmos, Polygon Studios, and Solana Ventures, as well as investors including Griffin Gaming Partners, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Tiger Global.

Forte’s platform allows game publishers to easily integrate blockchain technologies into their games, enabling features such as seamless, embeddable token wallets, non-fungible token (NFT) minting and selling, payment rails, and other services built specifically for blockchain token economies and the management of digital and virtual assets. In blockchain-enabled games, players can truly own goods, rather than making pure entertainment expenditures. Players around the world can freely trade goods and services with each other, and can participate in community economies that reward creativity, collaboration, and skill. These new systems provide game players and communities all around the world with new creative and economic opportunities.

“Over the past 50 years, games have undergone seismic shifts in their business and revenue models, becoming more aligned with players at every turn,” said Forte co-founder and CEO Josh Williams. “First there were arcade games, where players had to essentially pay per minute of play. Then came home console and PC games, where gamers could play as much as they want after paying once. Next, games moved online and the free-to-play (F2P) model allowed gamers to play even AAA games as much as they want for free, with only optional in-game / in-app purchases. The games industry has grown at each turn as it aligns more and more closely with players, and today it is the largest form of entertainment globally—larger than film and music combined—with nearly $180 billion in annual revenue. We believe we are at the forefront of a new technological wave, and blockchain gaming will be even bigger than all the shifts we’ve seen before. Forte’s mission is to prepare all game developers, big and small—whether you already have a AAA title with millions of players or you are building a blockchain game from the ground up—to be successful in this new landscape.”

Forte provides game publishers built-in compliance and security products, ensuring global frameworks for regulated activity including money transmittal, anti-money laundering, tax compliance, and IP protection in order to protect both players and publishers’ businesses and intellectual properties. Another unique benefit Forte enables for publishers is its customizability and interoperability with multiple blockchains. Many Forte partners start off with Forte to introduce NFTs and other tokenized assets both inside and outside their core games and apps, then graduate to long-term business models and revenue streams through in-game economies and player-to-player marketplaces, eventually connecting to Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchains, providing freedom of choice and maximum liquidity for their players.

“Forte has incredible traction in the gaming space, due in part to the robustness of its technical and compliance solutions,” said Daniel Jacobs, Kora Capital’s founder. “We partnered with Forte because of its ethos of building a platform that is simple to integrate without limiting developer flexibility or control, building for the long-term, solving scalability challenges that limit transaction throughput on blockchains today, mitigating high latency and costs associated with blockchain transactions, as well as future-proofing with blockchain portability and cross-chain interoperability. Publishers can grow their businesses with new, innovative technical solutions, and business models. Players are now able to truly own their in-app purchases and virtual goods. This is a win for the entire ecosystem.”

Forte platform status:

• Currently invite-only and in private testing.
• 40+ game developer partners.
• 15M+ players across partner games.

LionTree has served as exclusive financial advisor to Forte this year, bringing its global strategic relationships to Forte as the company continues to accelerate growth. In May, Forte raised $185 million in its Series A, at a $1 billion valuation, led by Griffin Gaming Partners. Today’s announcement brings Forte’s total capital raise to more than $900 million in 2021.

 

About Forte

 

Forte is building economic technology for games. Its end-to-end platform enables the emergence of community economics, a system where the interests of game developers and players are aligned, leading to healthier, sustainable game communities. The team is composed of longtime industry members (Unity, ngmoco, Riot Games, Electronic Arts, Sony, and Rockstar Games, among others), and is currently working with over 40+ acclaimed game developers from across the industry to reimagine the economics of games. www.forte.io

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211112005457/en/

Binance Labs to Launch 8-Week Long Season 3 of Incubation Program to Support Promising Projects in the Industry

Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and innovation incubator of Binance, announced Season 3 of the Incubation Program to support promising projects in the blockchain space. The Incubation Program is starting on November 15.

For the past 2 seasons of the Incubation Program, Binance Labs incubated market-leading and successful crypto businesses such as Polygon, Perpetual Protocol, Injective Protocol, SafePal, Cere Network, and Dune Analytics. Through the experience of incubating a wide range of projects at a very early stage, Binance Labs has acquired its own knowhow for developing and elevating projects.

The Incubation Program has some key elements:

• 8-week timeline for incubation projects to take advantage of the Binance Labs ecosystem, with a focus on mentorship from successful portfolio companies of Binance Labs, industry influencers, and potential investors.
• Binance Labs will support value-add services like PR & marketing and fundraising advice
• Incubation teams will join weekly fireside chat sessions with founders of Binance and other top crypto mentors for in-depth discussions
• Incubated projects will exhibit at Binance Labs Demo Day and formally pitch their progress and traction to a wide audience of investors and mentors.

Bill Chin, the Head of Binance Labs Fund, said: “Binance Labs Incubation Program was first created to nurture potential and promising entrepreneurs and projects that can accelerate the adoption and innovation in the industry. Through the Incubation Program, we hope to help the future industry key players go through easier ways of development and I am sure our team and the mentors can also be inspired by the fresh and new insights of the talented founders and teams all around the world."

There are 9 incubation projects that have been selected from the Fall 2021 Edition of the Binance Incubation Program submissions. They are all based in different parts of the world, and they are building products across a wide range of sectors.

• (Game) Block Ape Scissors, a play-to-earn ecosystem built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), incorporating gaming, NFTs and DeFi together into exciting, diverse and rewarding opportunities.
• (DeFi) Tranching Protocol, a yield optimization and hedging protocol implementing tranching for yield farming.
• (Game) GAT Network, a web of connected NFT trading and gaming projects that already has launched several projects on BSC.
• (DeFi/Stablecoin) Wombat, a trusted wallet for gamers and beyond to manage and trade their NFTs and token on different blockchains.
• (DeFi/Credit) Bird.Money, a new type of decentralized oracle that empowers blockchain developers with access to plug and play analytics products for next generation web platforms
• (Social) Mint Club, a smart token building platform without the need for coding or providing liquidity on the BSC.
• (Bridge) Raydius, a middleware solution designed to create a more connected blockchain ecosystem.
• (Trading) Copycat Finance, decentralized copy trading and copy farming platform on BSC where the innovative social trading meets the high yield social farming revolution.
• (Game) XII Braves (SkyArk Studio), a Singapore-based blockchain gaming studio.

Binance Labs invited mentors from the Binance team, potential investors from different venture capitals, and the leaders of previous incubation projects that went through similar processes as the 9 incubation projects will go through.

Ken Li, Investment Director at Binance Labs said - "All of these incubation projects have strengths in what Labs has been looking into. We are excited to support them at an early stage and contribute to the future of the industry through mentorship."

Chase Guo, Investment Director at Binance Labs added, “Our program has successfully incubated major projects for the industry in the past through other seasons of Incubation Program, and we hope to see the same track records from this season’s projects."

After the 8 weeks of the Incubation Program, Binance Labs will host an official demo day for the 9 projects, open to a broad audience of industry experts, mentors and investors. Through the pitches, projects can appeal to potential investors and find partners who will collaborate with them.

Binance Labs has incubated projects that eventually secured funds from other market players and these projects are well-positioned in the industry.

Polygon, formerly known as Matic Network, is one of such projects leading the industry. As an Ethereum scaling aggregator to scale up Ethereum through various scaling approaches, the project has gone through a steady development. Last year, Polygon became the most adoption solution in the industry with 3000+ Dapps and achieving DAUs higher than that of Ethereum mainchain itself. Next year, Polygon is working hard to become the biggest player in the ZK technology scaling. Polygon has already acquired and initiated various ZK initiatives.

Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, attending as one of the mentors for the Season 3 Incubation Program, said “Binance Labs Incubation Program was an important momentum if we see the history of this project. Through the programs Binance Labs has prepared, we could develop our business more, and eventually, we were able to launch our tokens through the Launchpad. On top of the financial investment Binance Labs made, the project was able to secure additional funding through the Launchpad and the attention of crypto users. We hope that through the Season 3 of Incubation Program, future market leaders can be discovered and incubated."

Dorahacks, a global hackathon organizer and one of the world's most active developer communities, is co-organizing the Season 3 of Incubation Program with Binance Labs. DoraHacks' open source developer platform and curation market, HackerLink, provides unique on-chain tools to incentivize open source developments around the world.

Binance Labs will also launch applications for its Season 4 Incubation Program, which will kick off in March of 2022. As one of the benefits of being part of the Binance Labs ecosystem, all portfolio company founder, mentor or Binance alumni can directly recommend projects to fast-track into the final interview for incubation selection. Interested applicants can apply for the program here.

Blockchain-based Fan Engagement Platform Sportzchain Raises Pre-seed Funding of $400K

• The new-age company will employ these funds in building its blockchain-based web app and branding & marketing initiatives
• The funding round was led by Mr. Ganeshram of Darq Capital, Mr. Jagadeesh Atukuri (Director of Comply Dot), and SHISAN Investments

SportZchain, India’s first blockchain-based fan engagement platform to connect fans and sports teams, has recently closed pre-seed funding of $400K. The brand will broadly utilize these funds on two fronts: building its alpha version of an interactive blockchain-based web app and implementing branding & marketing initiatives to drive awareness around its unique offerings. 

The funding round was led by Darq Capital, a new-age VC fund investing in crypto/blockchain based ventures and participated by other investors such as Mr. Jagadeesh Atukuri, Director of Comply Dot, and SHISAN Investments (founded by 5 partners incl. EX-COO of Goldman Sachs).

SportZchain spokesperson said, “We are delighted to close our pre-seed funding round successfully. We are also proud to attract relevant investors like Darq Capital, Comply Dot, and Shisan Investments, who believed in our idea and the long-term vision to create a disruptive fan engagement platform that can benefit multiple stakeholders. We are a sports-loving, crypto embracing team with an optimal mix of experience in the fields of strategic consulting, blockchain technology, fintech and sports marketing with a vision to empower fans and disrupt the fan engagement industry.”

Ideated in March 2021, Singapore-based SportZchain was founded by Siddharth Jaiswal with the belief that sports fans deserve a basic right to be heard by their favorite sports teams, help them make the right decisions by voting on official binding polls, and reap financial gains by owning branded sports token. The company is backed by a robust advisory team, comprising leading personalities like Ajeet Khurana (Ex-CEO of Zebpay and Head of Blockchain & Crypto Committee, India), Suhail Chandok (Star Sports TV Presenter, Analyst & Commentator – IPL, ICC Cricket, World Cups, Pro Kabaddi, Wimbledon, etc.), Oksana Belousova (CEO of Fenix Technology), to name a few.

With a vision to convert passive fans into Invested Fans, the blockchain-driven platform aspires to become a cornerstone in offering radical fan engagement in India, enabling and empowering fans and sports teams to connect better and benefit mutually.

About SportZchain

SportZchain is a blockchain-powered platform for fans to crowd-manage their favourite teams, games, leagues, events, and more. A platform that provides fans a direct power to not only follow & interact but actively ENGAGE and PARTICIPATE in various binding and non-binding decisions of the team.

SportZchain provides sports teams & leagues with blockchain-based tools to help them better engage & monetize their audiences. We help sports team to create ‘INVESTED FAN’ base and declutter noise present in existing social media platforms.

Winning Startups Announced for NEAR’s First-Ever Accelerator in India

• ArGo Protocol, MotoDB, and MooPay, the top three startups involved in the NEAR Blockchain Accelerator Program, will receive grant funding, networking opportunities and go-to-market support.
• NEAR announces additional grants and support for runners up as part of broader ecosystem development.
• Woodstock Fund, Fracton Ventures, and Buidlers Tribe to provide additional support to these teams to continue their growth and help them scale further.

NEAR Protocol, a super fast and secure open-source, developer-friendly, carbon neutral blockchain, today announced ArGo Protocol, MotoDB and MooPay as the winners of the three-month NEAR Blockchain Accelerator program. Prizes included a share of $100K along with support services aimed at strengthening the developer ecosystem in India.

Over 175 developers and innovators from across India participated in the virtual event. Finalists also participated in a four-week NEAR Blockchain Accelerator Bootcamp which consisted of a mentorship program and one-on-one sessions to help navigate the regulatory environment.

Industry mentors included Tanvi Ratna, Pareen Lathia, Raghu Mohan, Didier Pironi, Anish Mohammed, Jason Shah and other leaders involved in entrepreneurship, product development, and marketing. Teams were also invited to join NEAR’s Certified Developer Program to better understand and leverage the NEAR Protocol.

"The positive response received throughout the NEAR Blockchain Accelerator program has been a testimony to the spirit of innovation in the Indian developer pool. Through the course of this three-month-long program, we had the opportunity to support and mentor some of the brightest minds in India,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder, NEAR Protocol.

"With India being a globally recognized technology hub today, the participants of the accelerator presented novel blockchain concepts that we at the NEAR Protocol were glad to support. Our entry into the Indian market has been filled with unique ideas and Lumos Labs has been instrumental in augmenting the outreach," he added.

On the final Demo Day of the NEAR Blockchain Accelerator, six chosen finalists -- ArGo Protocol, Genebloc Private Limited, MooPay, Motodb, Pixelate, and PredictRAM--pitched their futuristic NEAR blockchain-based solutions to a panel of expert judges. Of those six, three were announced as the winners:

1. ArGo Protocol, a decentralized hosting and storage protocol for enterprises and developers.
2. MotoDB, a decentralized blockchain and DApp focussed on the automobile space.
3. MooPay, a blockchain-based payment and business solution for commerce and Woodstock Fund.

The keynote session, led by NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Robert Yan, NEAR’s Head of Developer Relations in Asia, explored The State of Web 3.0 Startups in India with Angel Investor and Serial Entrepreneur Ajeet Khurana, Policy 4.0 CEO Tanvi Ratna, and Raghu Mohan, CEO and cofounder of Lumos Labs.

The NEAR Blockchain Accelerator was launched in partnership with Lumos Labs, an innovation management firm, Woodstock Fund, a DLT- focussed multi-asset investment fund, Fracton Ventures, a prominent Web3.0 Japanese investment and development platform, and Buidlers Tribe, an incubator dedicated to driving the blockchain-based startup innovation in India.

Furthermore, Woodstock Fund announced it will review and reward solutions with an additional $100K pool as part of its commitment to NEAR ecosystem development.