Our London correspondent Nick Ayton aka The Sage of Shoreditch explores the recent maneuvering by the billionaires into the world of Initial Coin Offerings, AI and Blockchain.
ICOs have enjoyed their best run ever, albeit it’s a new phenomenon in recent time. The last six months have seen the ICO market leave traditional funding mechanisms in their wake. Will ICOs become the preferred mechanism for entrepreneurs of all shapes and wallet sizes? It seems so.
"The Midas touch boys are moving in as they know a good thing when they see it. And they don’t like to miss out."
It can come as no surprise to me to see billionaire moves by Mike Novogratz who placed 10 percent of his wealth into crypto and Mark Cuban who has announced his own ICO of Unikrn, a sports betting business. And there will be more to follow.
ICOs coming of age
Some are calling ICOs into question, demanding regulations and government intervention, others see it at a big scam. But ICOs are attracting a lot of interest from very successful entrepreneurs who are turning their back on banks as a source of capital that becomes very expensive, with its high fees and lots of strings attached.
"The involvement of the Billionaire Boys is the sign that ICOs are not only becoming mainstream but also a legitimate alternative capital market for already successful entrepreneurs."
Is this the extra endorsement needed where Bill Gates who has already said if he would start a new business today it would be in AI on the Blockchain?
Are records about to be broken, again
With Bancor, Status, Block One and others that have easily passed the $100 mln mark, are we likely to see soon the first billion dollar ICO?
Enter stage left, Gurbaksh Chahal who certainly has the Midas touch when it comes to backing the latest technology and is already disrupting global advertising with his AI marketing engine Gravity4. He wants to launch the largest ICO ever breaking the $500 mln plus mark, and who would be against him?
Can he make Gravity4 a leader in Artificial Intelligence Big Data Cloud, the largest ICO in ever surpassing $500 mln or even $1 bln as they take what is known as High-Frequency Marketing to the next level?
Who would bet against this maverick entrepreneur of Indian-American descent who founded his first company aged 16 and sold it for $40 mln? Further going on to sell four businesses for $300 mln: BlueLithium (behavioral targeting) to Yahoo, RadiumOne (programmatic advertising) and ShareGraph and innovative tech business.
Gurbaksh explains:
“We intend to take what we have done in AI marketing and connect it to the Blockchain. We have already created the world’s first Artificial Intelligence Big Data Cloud called Mona Lisa and we are already way ahead of SalesForce, Oracle and Adobe.”
Gravity4 already has a footprint in most of the major Fortune 1,000 brands globally and many consider their offering to be way ahead of anyone else. The business is on track to deliver $200 mln revenues in 2018 and so this is no mere startup.
High-frequency machine learning
Gravity4 is the world’s first high-frequency machine learning marketing operating system built to enhance advertising across SaaS Industries. It collates customer experiences so marketers can target customers more effectively through the entire customer journey, regardless of delivery channel. The proprietary AI technology ‘Mona Lisa’ builds a ‘consumer persona’ aggregating the data from all channels and touch points, using semantic graphs to form connection clusters and correlation variables in a single click of the mouse, optimizing and automating the effort in what is a $200 bln global advertising market.
The worlds of AI and Blockchain sit well together and deliver a powerful combination indeed.
With Gravity4 we are not seeing a startup trying to raise capital to build a Blockchain. Gravity4 is already a very successful global business and wants to raise further capital to extend its R&D to dominate the high-frequency machine learning marketing industry. Who would be against them?