Of the 17 startups graduating the Boost CV incubator this year, seven of them were focused around Bitcoin.
On demo day, each startup pitched to a group of more than 100 investors, and this year an explanation of Bitcoin itself had to be offered in advance for the event.
Here are the seven Bitcoin startups.
Vaurum, which is building an API for financial companies to integrate so that regular brokers can get access to Bitcoin. Part of their pitch was the fact that current Bitcoin trading sites do not look terribly trustworthy. That team was seeking $1 million seed funding, having already received $150,000.
VerifyBTC, an identity-verification-process streamliner for when Bitcoin exchanges call for that kind of information, works in seconds. It verifies a Bitcoin trader’s identity by cross-referencing data points with information from credit card companies. This would automate a process that an exchange such as Mt. Gox now does manually. The team sought $700,000 from investors.
Arbiter, a betting platform that would allow mobile apps to integrate gambling into their games, had already partnered with an unnamed game publisher and sought no additional funding.
BitPagos, a payment processor for the Latin American market, is specifically targeting Argentina’s tourism industry. In Argentina, CEO Sebastian Serrano said, Bitcoins might be marked up as much as 60% because customers consider it more stable than the peso. His team sought $500,000.
BitBox, initially a Bitcoin exchange, sought $500,000 as it steered itself toward a new strategy as a vertically integrated company.
BitWall, a micropayment processor, intends to introduce Bitcoin paywalls to monetize digital content. It sought $300,000.
Gliph, a mobile messaging and Bitcoin transaction app, is designed to allow encrypted communication and pseudonymity when making Bitcoin transactions between users. The company already received $200,000 from investors and has 20,000 users.