As part of our relentless pursuit to identify and share with our community some of the unique and compelling startup stories from the ecosystem, this week we spoke to Team Truscholar to understand more about their journey, their vision and the way forward. Truscholar is a blockchain-driven technology startup which aims at streamlining digital certificate issuance and management. Let’s read their unique story.
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with the team:
What is your start-up all about?
TruScholar is India’s first digital certificates and digital badges issuance & management platform, powered by blockchain technology.
Our proprietary SaaS platform helps universities, institutes, ed-techs, and event management companies in creating secure, verifiable and custom digital certificates.
These certificates can be graduation certificates, course completion certificates, participation certificates, and much more.
What was the idea and how did you transform it into a business?
Our core idea behind the business model is to revolutionize the certificates issuance and verification in India’s education sector, which is currently done through slow manual processes and is prone to a lot of fraudulent activities.”
We chose to use blockchain technology as it is the most secure technology available for the implementation of digital credentials and identity verification. We were inspired by MIT’s digital credentials consortium and wanted to adopt this methodology into India’s education ecosystem.
We started working with some brilliant minds from IIT Mumbai in realizing this technology.
What are the problems that your start-up is solving?
With our technology, we’re solving problems related to physical and manual certificates such as slow issuance and verification processes, fraudulent certificates, storage of certificates, replacing lost certificates, and secure digitization.
Apart from these issues, we have also identified problems related to human error, identity mismatch, legitimacy of credentials issued, false claims during employment, and high costs incurred during the verification process.
Our platform has the potential to curb all these problems effectively and improve the internal operations of our customers.
What is the background story of the founders?
We have two enthusiastic leaders, Mayur Zanwar and Samit Singhai. Who have a great vision for India’s education.
Mayur Zanwar is a passionate CA and blockchain evangelist who has been instrumental in entrepreneurship development and innovative ideas. He handles all the operational aspects of TruScholar and plays a critical role in establishing key relationships.
Samit Singhai is a successful entrepreneur, with core expertise in industrial engineering and technology. He has established a multi-crore business across central and south India. He handles all the tech aspects of the TruScholar product.
What motivated the founders to start a company?
The two main motivational factors are the various possibilities of blockchain and a strong desire to digitally transform India’s certificates issuance and verification.
What has been the lifecycle/timeline of your start-up?
Our ideation process started in Jan 2020. We had to spend a significant time finding the right technology and digital marketing partners to bring our idea to fruition.
Despite the challenges experienced during the 2020 covid period, we were able to release a functional prototype by the end of the year.
As of August 2021, our fully functional product is live with around 36+ customers. We’ve had the privilege to onboard big educational brands such as Padhega Bharat and Sathyabhama Institute.
What are the major challenges faced at the initial stages?
Though we were intrigued and passionate about blockchain technology, we had to learn the core technical aspects of this technology.
We also had to choose among multiple technology partners to build our product. These were some of the major challenges we faced in the beginning.
How did you overcome the hurdles and challenges?
By making mistakes and learning from them, without giving up on the dream.
What is your traction with respect to revenue and customer base?
We have 36+ customers onboarded, of which 3 customers are paid customers on the SaaS model and the remaining are freemium customers, who will shortly be onboarded. Our revenue cycle started in the 2nd quarter of 2021 and we have generated a revenue of INR 100,000.
How much has the company raised so far, and what’s the fundraising strategy going forward?
We have seen significant growth with a stable product. We are looking at onboarding 150+ customers by the end of this year. Post which we are looking to raise a series A investment.
Where do you see your start-up say in the next few years?
As founders, we want to see TruScholar as the #1 digital certificates platform across India in the next 5 years. We have already laid a strong foundation for this goal and we’re pretty sure we will reach this milestone.
What gives your start-up a competitive advantage in the industry?
Most of our competitors are not based out of India or rather their solutions are not built in India. They may not know the core problems of India’s education sector. Also, there are multiple issues related to data security, privacy and storage.
We are proud to say we are the 1st of the kind in India because there is no other player like us with such an advanced solution, specifically targeting the Indian education sector. Also, we follow privacy data protection guidelines to the dot and all of the data is stored within the Indian subcontinent.
What is your general view about the start-up community in India?
The startup community is thriving and it has a lot of potentials. We’re happy to be part of this community.
What is your comment on the role of the government to boost start-ups in India?
Programs such as Startup India and Make in India have driven us to be what we are today. We believe the government is doing everything required to boost the startups in India.
Apart from your industry, which other sector looks promising in the near future?
There is a lot of improvement in the Agritech industry and we have seen great innovations in the last 5 years.
What would be your advice for upcoming start-ups as well as ideas?
Just follow your idea with passion and enthusiasm. As you do that, you will find new ways.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
