The InnoVEX 2021 Pitch Contest announced the winners on July 30 via an online premiere. Out of the 10 finalists, 2 teams won the Qualcomm Innovation Award. One of the winners is KryptoGO, a Taiwan based startup focusing on regulatory technology (regtech), fintech, and blockchain.
KryptoGO was founded by Kordan Ou, former President of Cobinhood which was Taiwan's largest cryptocurrency exchange. The KryptoGO team includes experts from the finance and tech industries, including blockchain and AI from prestigious universities.
Larry Ho, the Business Development Manager of KryptoGO commented that their mission is to make decentralized finance accessible to everyone. As of time of writing (August 17, 2021); several cryptocurrency ecosystems have reached their all-time high and are able to give their investors yields that are impossible to reach with traditional finance; however it is not mainstream due to 3 main barriers: technical knowledge, trust, and regulations.
Out of the 3, perhaps the most important is the regulation aspect as it can also affect users' trust. He remarked that traditional finance instruments and entities are highly regulated which brings about trust from the investors. He commented that “Less regulations might provide the investors higher yield, but it will not be trusted.” A few of the methods to improve the users' trust as well as a legal requirement in many cases is Corporate Due Diligence (CDD) and Know Your Customer (KYC) measures. Both are the core of KryptoGO's business; they even went a step further to develop their own KYABC (Know Your Address, Business, Customer) measure.
In the interview, Mr. Ho shared an event from Cobinhood where all 150 employees had to spend 2 weeks to handle KYC measures of over 50 thousand cases on the first day of launch. He said that this makes scaling KYC to be a very difficult endeavor as every increase of cases to handle means the company will need to hire more people. KryptoGO's solution of combining AI and blockchain can complete KYC faster for a fraction of the price offered by traditional KYC services.
In the InnoVEX 2021 Pitch Contest, their solution that combines AI with blockchain for regtech in the finance industry helped them win the Qualcomm Innovation Award. On winning the aforementioned award, Mr. Ho commented: “It was a great honor to win the award. Qualcomm is very well respected in the tech ecosystem and they now also have a heavy focus on AI. I'm glad they recognize that regtech and finance can be improved with AI; I'm also glad Qualcomm gave the award not seeing AI as a monolith of technology, but based on what it can do.”
When asked on what he would like to share with other teams and startups who are interested in joining InnoVEX and the InnoVEX Pitch Contest, Mr. Ho said “Definitely go for it. It provides great exposure for your startup and the judges provide great feedback. Clarity is important when you pitch, so don't forget to keep it simple.”
Watch the InnoVEX 2021 Final Pitch here
For more details on the InnoVEX Pitch Contest, visit the website here
InnoVEX Online 2021 is still live until the end of the year! Connect with KryptoGO here