Four blockchain start-ups – Assetify, Cannomy, King Football and Smart Credit – have been shortlisted for AE Ventures, one of the recently-signed new partners of the Microsoft Innovation Centre, Starfleet accelerator programme. The event attracted over 180 blockchain start-ups from all over the world.
The four start-ups will receive a $100K venture investment each as well as six more months of acceleration, including support in the field of technology, business development, marketing and legal affairs from the AE Ventures team.
More importantly, they will benefit from Starfleet’s solid mentorship network, knowledge base and expertise as part of the accelerator.
Assetify, Cannomy, King Football and Smart Credit were chosen during Demo Day held at the Microsoft Innovation Centre, an event that was streamed worldwide and which saw 10 final companies pitching their investment ideas.
Welcoming all the participating start-ups, Vangelis Morfis, Microsoft’s M&O Lead for Greece, Cyprus, Malta, said: “At Microsoft, we believe that technology can empower all organisations and all people to achieve more.
“This is exactly what we are doing today, together with our MIC partners, Aeternity Ventures, promoting technology in Malta to help shape a better future for all. We are very proud to see and reward the work done by these start-ups in the areas of innovative technologies, such as Blockchain. We commit to do even more in the coming months.”
AE Ventures CEO Nikola Stojanow continued: “With the new investments, we are stepping on our broad experience in developing blockchain projects, the strong expertise of our mentors and the support of the fast-growing blockchain ecosystem and we will focus our efforts on supporting the new companies in the family of AE Ventures. We’re looking forward to joining forces with these promising start-up teams showing the full potential of blockchain technologies to change the world.
“I believe that Starfleet Malta is the best programme we have done so far. The quality of the teams is exceptional and I’m positive that we will have great products running on æternity blockchain in the next few months,” she added.
“Our partnership with Microsoft Innovation Centre is just getting started and I’m excited by all the future projects we are planning together in Malta,” said Starfleet Accelerator chief Luka Sucic.
Assetify is a b2b platform for crypto-backed loans, enabling lending institutions to provide credits using digital assets as collateral. It automates the relations between the user of the loan and the lender, creating multi-signature wallets. This is much cheaper and less risky. The company already has two paying customers: one bank in Switzerland and one lander in Bulgaria.
Cannomy is a pioneer of the cannabis economy, combining the benefits of promising blockchain technologies with the fast-growing cannabis ecosystem. The team is using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to source the funding of new ventures in this field, to facilitate their operations and manage the shareholders.
King Football is using chips and æternity blockchain to help football fans easily track items and identify if they are fake or original.
Building on this functionality, the team is creating a social platform allowing fans to receive personalised messages from football stars as well as to trade original items, creating a big secondary market. The popular Bulgarian football player Dimitar Berbatov is also involved in the project.
SmartCredit is aiming to democratise the lending industry, using transferable tokenised credit, and thus helping every lender to become a bank.
This huge industry is responsible for 90 per cent of the money available today and its decentralisation will bring significant new advantages. The platform will create 2-click consumer credits (money on demand) for the borrower and tools like credit tokenisation, credit transferability and interest-bearing to the holder.
Microsoft Innovation Centre (Malta) is a leading partner and host of the programme’s third edition. Next year, Starfleet accelerator will start its first programme in Bangalore, India, thus expanding the scope of its activities.