After spending November and December 2016 in Silicon Valley mostly business planning, prototyping and successfully building relationship with top VCs , we decided last January to move our commercialization and prototyping office to EU for our first go-to-market. It became evident that EU laws and practices and political climate are more in tune, in the near future, with the possibility of offering ultra high levels of cybersecurity to eterprises and consumers.
We therefore spent January and March 2017 in Berlin – location of our OS/microkernel partner at the time – where we: built our non-security critical supply chain; advanced our product virtual prototyping, UX and UI designs; improved our web presence and product video; and expanded our team with an amazing local team with Toby Shotz, Nikoloz Kapanadze and Alexander Elkin. Check out team page for details!
Interest in our startup by private and public investors, and by prospective pilot clients, has soon moved beyond Berlin, especially in Luxembourg. Since end of March, through the introduction of our new advisor and former Minister of Defense and Communications,, Jean-Louis Schiltz, we met a large number of angels, cofounders and public institutions in Luxembourg.
We have entered in LoI for a wide long-term partnership agreement with the Univ. of Luxembourg SnT – Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, and in the process of re-incorporating from Delaware USA to Luxembourg concurrently with the closing our 200k€ angel round with local investors in the next weeks.
A substantial interest manifested so far by Luxembourg public entities justifies expectations for: (a) an active and formal joint promotion of a Trustless Computing standards, certification and labels, to help Luxembourg lead in enterprise and financial cybersecurity; and for (b) large opportunities for public and public-private investments and financing, for both our angel and seed rounds.
The European Cyber Fund and Minister of Economy comments to it, the Luxembourg Future Fund, the mission and aims of LuxTrust, “Security made in Luxembourg” initiative, “Hosted in Luxembourg” label, some LuxInnovation, and of U. Lux Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT), seem to converge in the aim of attracting and promoting business to Luxembourg, through the provisioning of world-leading IT services, legislation, infrastructure and ecosystem for digital information, communication and transaction security. Our startup TRUSTLESS.AI, the non-profit from which it spun off 6 months ago, Open Media Cluster, its non-profit global event series Free and Safe in Cyberspace, its emerging non-profit Trustless Computing Consortium and Trustless Computing Certification Body are uniquely positioned to deliver on such vision, and enable Luxembourg to:
(A) attract and retain global enterprises based on radically-unprecedented levels “confidentiality and integrity protection from competitors and hackers” through public and private IT service offerings, advanced legislation and related unique IT security Trustless Computing Certification and labeling. Such locational advantage would complement existing ones, including the “confidentiality protection of tax planning from other EU member state tax agencies”, since upcoming EU tax transparency regulations, announced historical US tax reforms may, in the near future, reduce such locational advantage.
(B) In the medium term, foster the creation of a local ecosystem that leads a few other EU members states – such our current members of the Consortium, Italy and Austria – to create the World 1st ultra-high assurance IT cluster, the EU Trustless Computing Cluster, with other EU member states, with Luxembourg leading; and
(C) Ultimately play a critical role to help Luxembourg lead Europe in cybersecurity, by turning a huge threat into a huge opportunity for economic growth, political leadership and social impacts.
We are relocating and re-incorporating in Luxembourg concurrently with the closing of our 200K€ angel round, in 1-2 weeks. We are dealing with 5 active Lux-based angel investors, 2 cofounders, 2 public-private and private VCs, and the European Investment Fund.
