Dedicated blockchain accelerator opens doors to first cohort

Using blockchain to build trust

“Most of the other startups in the accelerator programme have a core technology, and that technology is their IP [intellectual property], whereas our IP is the relationships and our understanding of those different partners, and being able to present curated suggestions to them about who they should be partnering with,” Applebee added.

Blockchain therefore enables Super Global to foster transparency and trust between various partners by securely storing all of their transactions and reporting data.

“The technology, for us, is more about facilitating that, and baking in the trust that is necessary, which is where blockchain comes in. The blockchain part and the technology part is just a rational business decision, rather than it being like ‘we have developed the coolest new technology’,” said Applebee.

By the end of the three-month programme, he said the goal was to have completely validated every aspect of Super Global’s business model.

Others, however, are keen to use the accelerator to prove the product to their industry.

“The big thing for us is getting our tech in the hands of construction companies, large or small. We want to test what we’ve built,” said Josh Graham, CEO of Ehab, a data and process management platform for the entire lifecycle of a construction project.

“One of the things we built is a supply chain tracker. So if you’re a supplier we want to speak to you. If you’re not a supplier but you’re interested in using blockchain technology to create efficiencies in your business processes, we want to speak to you, because the whole point of our platform is that now we’ve built the underlying tech, modules can just be built on top of that,” he said.

“The entirety of the [construction] industry has a huge lack of transparency, from people not knowing when a change has been made to not knowing what materials are in their buildings. Blockchain is a really good way of having permissioned access to that data.”

Using blockchain for the right reasons

For many of the startups, as well as the founders of StateZero Labs, transparency and social transformation is at the heart of blockchain technology.

“We realised that as a technology, blockchain had a really bad reputation for the wrong reasons, and there was a real misunderstanding about what the technology could really do,” said Katie Mills, director and co-founder of StateZero. “Cryptocurrency – when you say blockchain, that’s where people go.

“There are some real-world problems this technology could solve. We need to talk about those rather than the bad stuff that happens with the technology, because [as with] every technology, it’s about the people who use it.”

StateZero’s Gault said that outside of the technology, the idea of the accelerator programme was also around levelling the playing field for startups: “We always talk about trying to bridge the gap between humanity and tech, and that’s why we’ve got the model that we have.”

According to the two co-founders, the £50,000 funding is awarded based on a set of milestones each startup has to achieve. At the end of the three-month programme, StateZero will then look to follow up with direct investment into the startups, with the programme essentially allowing both the accelerator and the startups to do due diligence on one another.

“What usually happens is the equity stake is set at the very beginning, which for us felt a little bit unfair – to take it all upfront when they don’t know if they’re going to like us and vice-versa,” said Mills. “It’s really crucial the founders pick the right investor.”