[Founder Feature@TC] Sept 2019
Name: Edmund Lowell, Founder & CEO, 31yo from America
Technopreneur Circle member: Since Jan 2018
Company: KYC-Chain Ltd (Banking & Finance)
Website: www.kyc-chain.com
Fun facts about me:
I used to do a lot of martial arts. I don’t really have as much time now, but I love to play chess and a bit of brazilian jiu jitsu when I do. I find them to be very similar and cerebral, involving spatial awareness, tactics and strategy. I’m a competitive person and never lose! Or at least, I don’t like to!
The company under 20 words:
A compliance dashboard and whitelabel customer onboarding portal enabling companies to perform due diligence on customers as per AML/KYC requirements.
What my company name & logo means:
There are good and bad actors in the financial space – we want to make it easy to identify the bad, and quicker to pass through the good. That’s generally what we were going for when we designed our logo.
Blockchain allows untrusting parties to reach agreement on a set of facts in a decentralized manner – we utilize blockchain technology as a trust anchor for verified credentials. At the time we started – 2015-ish there were almost no companies working on utilizing blockchain for the identity space. Now we have countless competitors but our mission remains the same: to enable self sovereign identity for identity owners, and provide a more efficient kyc process for relying parties.
Why I started the company & my journey so far:
I was struggling with KYC – performing the laborious manual process of collecting documentation from clients, performing due diligence and sanctions screening, and then handing it over to a bank who repeated the exact same process! I was looking at software to solve this problem, and none of the available options were very good. Also, around this time (2013) people were starting to talk about distributed ledgers being used for things other than money – and I authored a whitepaper exploring the idea of leveraging distributed technology for managing identity. After having this paper peer reviewed, I started building a minimal viable product and took it to market, getting feedback from customers, and later joined 4 different accelerators to gain traction and product market fit.
My lightbulb advice:
Solve a large problem, repeatedly, reliably, profitably, at scale – in a way that is a net positive to society. There is no shortcut to success – you have to be willing to work really, really hard and even then – success is never guaranteed.
I’m currently looking for:
Investors, Partners, Talents (team members)
You can reach me @
Edmund@kyc-chain.com
Technopreneur Circle is a member-based community platform funded by Vertex Ventures for tech startups to connect, communicate, and collaborate. More information available at www.technopreneurcircle.com.
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This article first appeared on Technopreneur Circle’s Medium page.