A Wilmington startup wants to be the email of web3. And thanks to a new blockchain platform, it could be on its way to making the goal a reality.
Telios, co-founder Gareth Harte said, wants to create the email protocol for the future of web3.
It’s a complete one-eighty from two years ago, when Harte and his co-founder, Youri Nelson, were working at Wilmington-based Live Oak Bank battling the tide of Paycheck Protection Program applications, federally-backed loans intended to help small businesses during the early months for the pandemic. It was a trying time, with business owners reaching out to the digitally-focused bank in hopes that the PPP could help them save jobs.
“We were just working like crazy, trying to service all these loans and getting people paid,” Harte said. “It required us to have a lot more communication online.” And that presented a problem – transacting sensitive data, especially banking information, with other companies.
Even amid rampant data breach headlines in recent years, customers were still sidestepping security protocols, sending sensitive information over apps like Gmail, he said.
Harte realized there had to be a better way. He teamed up with Nelson, who was working in analytics at the bank.
“Let’s make a go of this, start building a communication platform on web3,” he said. Web3, the catch-all term for a new iteration of the internet powered by blockchain technology and not major companies, is a buzzword in tech entrepreneurship – and one getting a lot of attention in the sector.
Telios started as a side project, seeing if they could send email from one computer to the next. They managed to make it work, and kept going, inch by inch, soon proving they could create a peer-to-peer connection on mobile.
“We just kept at it,” Nelson said.
Telios is a fully decentralized peer-to-peer email service provider that will allow users to send and receive encrypted messages and files.
The firm’s original financing came from colleagues, about $376,000 – a sum it’s still operating on a year later. Recently, the firm started charging for the platform, which has about 2,500 customers. It recently scored a big win, being named among the first wave of grantee projects to be built on Coreum, a new enterprise-grade blockchain.