Blockchain startup nets $3m seed funding from Sequoia India, others

Singapore- and Thailand-based blockchain startup Band Protocol has raised US$3 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia India. Dunamu & Partners and SeaX also participated in the round.

With the fresh funding, the startup wants to accelerate the development of its mainnet, which is the main blockchain network for transactions.

It also wants to establish its go-to-market strategy for 2019 and expand its engineering team to support its solution launch later this year.

“Because we are a protocol, we need to support other developers and enterprises who want to develop on top of our protocol, which will require a bigger team,” Soravis Srinawakoon, Band Protocol’s co-founder and CEO, tells Tech in Asia.

Founded in 2017, Band Protocol enables users to create “token-curated” communities to solve problems like fake news and the misuse of user data. The protocol uses tokens as an economic incentive to coordinate people in the online community, where data owners and contributors can be rewarded and compensated.

“We used to visit Reddit and Bitcointalk to discuss blockchain and crypto technology. It’s full of self-promoted ICOs now. We decided that there should be a better way to curate data in the online communities,” Srinawakoon explains.

Any entity – be it a company, brand, or developer – can use Band Protocol’s proprietary platform to set up a community focused on a specific category or topic as well as issue personalized tokens to curate data and information within that community.

The platform makes it easier for developers or companies to plug in tokens into their ecosystem. “They can use our SDK to get started within minutes rather than days, and without the hassle of dealing directly with blockchain and smart contract,” Srinawakoon says.