Winning contests is just a small part of big plans coming out of TraceRx, but the Richmond startup is beginning to make a habit of it.
The supply chain software company was awarded $10,000 as the winner of last week's Dominion Energy Innovation Center pitch competition, hosted by Randolph-Macon College. It follows TraceRx's first place, $5,000 award in June from the annual SCOREcard pitch competition.
Founder and CEO Matthew Rosen said the company would use the prize money for marketing and outreach, including attending the international Aid & Trade Show in London in April. But its more substantial plans include an investment round that Rosen said is planned to close soon and eclipses its $300,000 seed funding round from June 2018.
Using cloud computing and blockchain technology, TraceRX lets aid organizations and NGOs track inventory and facilitates communication throughout the supply chain. For example, relief workers use the web app to order a shipment of penicillin, and the shipment of that order is constantly tracked and permanently recorded via blockchain. If there's a recall of a batch of penicillin, supply chain managers use the app to instantly ping every phone associated with that product and track their returns.
The company was founded in January last year, and is negotiating deals with one large client in Richmond, two in D.C. and one in Germany. It also received a year-long membership to DEIC coworking space and resources from the competition.
The 2018 capital raise fueled TraceRx's early pivot to blockchain, which originally wasn't part of the plan. A developer working on its first product version suggested the conversion, and Rosen took a weekend deep-dive into the tech.
"I read into it – all the use cases," he said. "Hyper-ledger white papers, ICOs, the entirety of it, and I became so convinced by the literature of this opportunity that we scrapped the entire engineering model and migrated to 100 percent on-chain systems over the next few weeks."
With 11 blockchain developers from LeewayHertz and $300,000, it created its first commercial product and started testing it, leading to its current client acquisition push, Rosen said.
Its customers operate internationally, organizing aid to developing countries and disaster relief efforts, like medicine, disease-testing kits and mosquito nets.
"I think we'll gain some momentum and buy-in as we pick up larger organizations," Rosen said. "And that will increase the adoption rate as we start to get feedback and release the new [product] versions."
The DEIC pitch competition also awarded $2,000 to Randolph-Macon student company G.W. Home, which is testing a product that improves the recycling process by compacting the bag into a disc and removing bacteria.
Quartr, an advertising feedback platform; SSUPP Foods, a sunflower food product startup; and student company Diesel to Freedom also pitched in the contest.
