Blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, will revolutionize how corporations operate. The groundbreaking technology brings higher levels of efficiency, security and privacy to everyday business workflows and operations.
But the technology is in its early days. Jim Safran, CMO and co-founder of QBRICS, says the awareness of the technology’s prowess is becoming mainstream, but it’s not yet available to enterprises in a way that is immediately usable.
Put another way: Blockchain solutions are not yet plug-and-play, where companies can purchase and utilize a solution off the self. Today, large companies have to contract expensive third-party programmers to build custom applications or reallocate in-house resources in order to take advantage of blockchain’s benefits.
“It needs some enhancements to make it useful and safer, [which] is the idea behind the QBRICS platform,” says Safran.
The experienced and global team at QBRICS — Rakesh Ramachandran, CEO; Brennan Bennett, COO; Rajiv Chandran, CTO; and Safran, CMO — is building an enterprise blockchain platform to help financial services, health care and supply chain companies.
The co-founders come from different backgrounds, creating a solid team with experience in cloud management, software architecture and health care blockchain, as well as familiarity with selling emerging technologies. “We are very focused on bringing efficiency and more security, and making blockchain appropriate for the enterprise,” says Safran.
The QBRICS platform has several features, including personalized access controls for rule-based, auditable and precise read-and-write privileges; the ability to scale cooperative efforts quickly among enterprises, their vendors and customers; and unconstrained enterprise interoperability.
The last capability is extremely important. A company may have several lines of business that each utilize a single blockchain. “Different business units interact with it differently so there’s a problem with the interoperability,” adds Safran. QBRICS ensures the data is kept secure while the units collaborate.
Since the company was founded a year ago, QBRICS has gone through two accelerators: The team participated in an accelerator with Infosys and most recently completed the QC Fintech program, which gave Safran the opportunity to pitch at the Southeast Fintech Venture Conference.
The company also released an alpha version of their platform. “A couple of the technologies are now available to roll out into proof of concepts and pilots that we are in discussions with,” states Safran.
One of the use cases they are developing is a solution for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which the European Union will implement toward the end of May of this year. This regulation will strengthen the data protection rules for corporations operating in the EU. Companies will now face onerous fines if they breach consumers’ data, and if a customer requests his or her data be deleted, companies must quickly and traceably comply.
The QBRICS product — which they intend to sell to consulting companies as a new service offering — provides two benefits, according to Safran: “It standardizes [the consulting company’s] monitoring of compliance on their customers’ behalf, [and] it also gives the data compliance officer a tool that he can use, real-time, to make sure that they are in compliance.”
Also, just last week the QBRICS team announced a strategic alliance agreement with Bravatek Solutions, Inc. — a high-tech security solutions portfolio provider based out of Austin, TX. Through this partnership, QBRICS will extend their platform’s reach to Bravatek’s existing and potential clients.
Lastly, the team has started to raise funds — $2 million — to secure patents and intellectual property and to build out the platform to a production model.
The co-founders are an ambitious group: Despite starting just a year ago, they are thinking big. “Within five years, we want to be $100 million company,” says Safran.
See the QBRICS website for more information about the team and platform.
