Once upon a time, our CEO Edmilson Rodrigues left his work at Google in Brazil to pursue his dream of doing an MBA in the USA. Unfortunately he could not accomplish it because, as a Brazilian he had very few credit opportunities to study abroad.
But he was accepted at Draper University, the 7 weeks program in Silicon Valley created by the legendary venture capitalist Tim Draper.
After the program, from 34 students in the class, 3 of them got investment to make their idea happen, and our CEO was one of them. Back then, the idea was Credit for Education, and he found the perfect co-founders in Túlio Braga and Plínio Braga. Ed, Túlio and Plínio are the original founders.
In early 2016 they decided to pivot the concept to personal credit through mobile phones, allowing people in Brazil to have access to cheaper and better loans.
With that concept they got accepted at the Menorca Millennials, a "Decelerator" in the island of Menorca in Spain. In that program they found the fund Lanzame Capital which, together with Tim Draper, invested another round in the startup.
With the new resources, the team constructed the app for loans origination and validated the units economics of the business doing the first batch of loans. But soon they discovered that the problem with access to credit is less about the loan origination and more about the economics in developing nations.
But as "the world´s biggest problems are the worlds biggest business opportunities", they devised a way of using the exponential technology of the blockchain to solve the two biggest problems with credit: The cost of capital and the information asymmetry between the credit companies.
And that was the insight which resulted in the idea of the Swapy Network, a network incentivized by a token for people to share their financial data and invest in credit companies in different countries.
Some investors loved this idea and our vision of Universal Access to Credit. That is when we raised additional capital from Huiyin Blockchain Ventures and Tim Draper again.
Also, in less than two months we pitched our vision in three big conferences:
Consensus 2017 in NYC:
Exponential Finance 2017 in NYC:
Singularity University Global Summit 2017 in San Francisco:
Now, our team has worked hard to transcribe our vision of Universal Access to Credit in our Whitepaper and we are receiveing peer-feedback before we start to fully spread the word about out ICO.
We are tired but we are happy. We are doing our best to use this amazing technology (the blockchain) to solve the problem of access to credit and create a world of shared prosperity in which we want our children to live in. That is our dream for Swapy Network.
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STOPGo #Swapy!! It was great to read this post and remember all the steps we went through until now. #ico