Q: Can you please tell us about your company and the specific problem or challenge that you are addressing?

SIMBA Chain Inc. is a cloud based Blockchain as a Service platform, enabling users across a variety of skill sets to implement decentralized applications that connect users and providers directly without third parties in both government and enterprise networks using Blockchain technology.

Q: Can you please tell us a little about the market and the market opportunity?

HealthSpace Data Systems signed a Letter of Intent to collaborate with SIMBA Chain to expand HealthSpace’s ability to develop blockchain technology into its existing platform. SIMBA Chain will use its expertise and experience in blockchain to help develop and guide the initial prototype HealthSpace will produce. SIMBA Chain also assisted in the development of a white-paper for how HealthSpace to leverage blockchain into both the public and private sectors for auditing purposes. HealthSpace intends to use the initial version developed with SIMBA Chain (“SIMBA”) to provide a proof of concept in order to demonstrate how audits and other regulatory checklists can be stored efficiently and cohesively in the blockchain. By doing so, HealthSpace can further integrate its existing iPad and Android apps to go beyond just government inspections and into private audits. Combining audit control software with the power of the blockchain will create a comprehensive toolset for furthering transparency between multiple parties who need concurrent access to the same chain of data, but have different rules for how or when that data is entered.

SIMBA Chain has also signed an agreement with Microsoft to use their Government Azure cloud platform, together Microsoft and SIMBA Chain will co-market their technology solutions to government and enterprise customers.

Most recently, SIMBA Chain was awarded a contract by Dow Chemical to integrate its SIMBA API with the company’s SAP ERP system for the use of Blockchain in tracking and logistics.

Q: Please tell us a little about your technology that drives your platform?

We are hosted on the Microsoft Azure Gov Cloud and our user interface provides and easy way for developers to generate their own APIs on the fly from their smart contracts.

Q: What geographic markets are you focusing on currently?

We are focus on the global developer community of distributed applications, however our initial focus has been North American enterprises.

Q: What markets will you focus on in the near future and what is your plan to conquer them?

We’ll be focusing on a select group of enterprise customers and government customers that have approached us to use our specific solution.

Q: What are the key user benefits and features of your platform?

SIMBA Chain’s Four Pillars of Technology:

• Custom Business APIs: SIMBA models customer business applications and generates Blockchain applications and business networks the way they want: user groups, users, events, assets and interactions (transactions) are converted into a customer API for Blockchain access, along with a HTML5 Web app for further customization.
• Simba API: Behind the scenes, the custom business APIs are wired to a common SIMBA API, configured using the specified Blockchain and data store. Currently we support Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric Blockchains, and the IPFS datastore, with more Distributed Database datastores to come.
• Data Bundles: Assets can represent many things e.g. a physical entity, a document, or a dataset containing a number of text, binary and media elements. SIMBA Data Bundles wrap data for an asset into an Asset Manifest, which specifies data relationships using links to hashes that represent off-chain data on IPFS, or other distributed data stores e.g. CEPH, etc.
• SIMBA Pub/Sub: SIMBA captures events from different Blockchains using a common API. Users or groups can subscribe to events using the SIMBA platform or setup Web hooks for notification of certain events in their own systems.

 Q: Who are your competitors?

IBM, Deloitte, Guardtime

Q: What makes your platform stand out?

SIMBA Chain enables the government or enterprise user control over their data and they can bring their business logic the platform will auto-generate a custom API for them, we call it, BYOL, “Bring Your Own Logic”. We secure transaction payloads, so all information is encrypted across every part of the communication pipeline. And we provide the performance scalability to allow applications to become decentralized and distributed.

 Q: Tell us about your team?

Joel Neidig, CEO and Co-founder

Principal Investigator awarded Phase 1 SBIR from DARPA for Secure Messaging Platform using Blockchain

13 Years of Experience integrating manufacturing technology and software development

SME 2015 Young Manufacturing Engineer of the Year Award

Spoke at the White House by request of the National Economic Council and the President’s Chief of Staff on behalf of Manufacturing USA, discussing Blockchain and IoT

Dr. Ian Taylor, CTO and Co-founder

Distributed Computing and Data Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame

Researching and implementing artificial-neural-network

Managed over 15 research and industrial projects, published over 150 papers,3 books, acted as guest editor for several special issues in journals and chairs the WORKS Workflow workshop yearly at Supercomputing

Won the Naval Research Lab best researchpaper (ALAN Berman) prize in 2010, 2011 and 2015

Reader in Cardiff University, UK

Dr. Jarek Nabrzyski, VP and Co-founder

Director of the Center for Research Computing at Notre Dame

Resource management in distributed systems (grids, clouds)

Manages over 25,000 CPU cores in systems of various architectures and interconnects

Expert in Scientific computing

Q: How will you succeed in such a saturated market?

Building a developer community around our Platform with open source tools that they can leverage to kick start their Distributed Application Development.

Q: How many users do you have?
We currently have just a handful of partners using our enterprise platform but by year end we plan to have hundreds of developers using our open source tools that integrate with our platform.

Q: What is your focus for the next 6-12 months?

Build our developer community and perfect our go to market strategy. We also want to develop new features to our platform and highlight customer use cases.

 Q: How much money have you raised and from who?

We recently received a $25,000 High Potential Startup Grant from Elevate Ventures, elevateventures.com

Q: Are you looking to raise another round? If so how much?

We will probably raise a $2 million round by the close of Q3 2018

Where did idea come from?

SIMBA Chain Inc. was formed in 2017 from a grant awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Companies (ITAMCO) and the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame in order to develop a secure, unhackable messaging and transaction platform for the U.S. military. SIMBA API is a robust and efficient decentralized distributed technology originally implemented for Defense Department communications. Its uses included communication between ground troops and their headquarters or between intelligence officers and the Pentagon.

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