Author: Guruprasad Venkatesha, CEO at b-cube.ai
We are very happy to be declared as the winner of the 16th edition of the Graines de Boss competition!
Graines de Boss was created in 2004 to provide quality support to young business creators through a network of high-level mentor leaders. Thanks to the support of Nicolas de Tavernost (CEO of M6, French TV channel), the Graines de Boss competition has been launched every year since its creation on the CAPITAL economical TV program.
Since 2012, Graines de Boss has enabled large groups to strengthen their approach to open innovation and investors to detect high-potential start-ups.
Why is it unique?
An assessment, selection, and support associating 50 top managers each year in a climate of trust conducive to the development of partnerships with large companies (financing, contracts, resources). Daring, innovation, and solidarity. Juries and laureates contribute to the development of economic activity in France and job creation. 140 million euros is the sum raised by the 152 winners of the competition so far from funds and business angels. The competition has triggered the development of a network of mentors in Great Britain, French-speaking Switzerland, and Canada with their partner Alter’Inno, thus promoting the development abroad of innovative, export-ready companies.
Jury members come from top companies including those who are in Fortune 500 list from France & top VC’s.
Process of selection:
In every edition, there are over 1000 applicants out of which there will be only 16 winners per year, so chances of winning are very low. It begins with filling up an application form online, 150 startups will get a positive reply from the organizers to go ahead out of over 1000 applications. Jury members of the Graines de Boss community who are CEOs, President’s and top management executives from Fortune 500 companies from France select a project to mentor and will themselves pitch the project in front of other’s jury members. There are 50 finalists after this step which happens in 5 batches across the year. After a few weeks of each batch final, there is a pitch again by the startup itself, in front of the Jury, where the 16 will emerge as laureates.
Personally, last year in October we had an MVP and were feeling lost as getting into the crypto community was not easy as there are hardly few here in Hungary. Traditional financial companies are not so open to cryptos either, but it was this time when we met Danijel from InoSens & Smilja from VOICT as the jury members of the BlockStart 2019 Pitch night competition in Budapest where we won the first prize. They were at the event to speak about the Block.IS programme which encouraged us to apply for it and then with Block.IS we got into the Blockchain/Crypto community, met many mentors who motivated us, and helped with their contacts to take our project ahead.
We are now developing blockchain solutions for our business using smart contracts for profit-sharing from the equity-free grants from Block.IS. We are proud to be part of the EU backed Blockchain Acceleration programme Block.IS which gave us everything that we needed at the right time!
What will the winner get?
Winner will be given an award at the Ministry of Economy and Finance of France in the presence of the honourable minister on the 27th of November 2020 in Paris. This will be broadcasted on the most-watched TV channel M6 of France. They will also make a small interview about us, our product and our experience in this long Graines de Boss competition. Top 15 VC’s of France and many Business Angels will also attend the ceremony to invest in startups who have won the competition.
At b-cube.ai, we always have only one thing in mind which is to make trading in cryptocurrencies easier and more profitable. Crypto assets have outperformed all the asset classes for the past seven years and this is a golden opportunity for everyone to invest a bit in this new asset class. The asset management industry is plagued with distrust due to frauds, Ponzi schemes, non-transparent dealings & low returns. This is the reason why b-cube.ai was born to address all these issues.
Our main USP is we do not hold custody of client’s funds, all the transactions happen in client’s own account, we have outperformed the “Buy and Hold strategy” on BTC & ETH since our inception in September 2019. Simplicity in starting the trading by just typing your API keys on our platform and start to trade. We are extremely transparent about our trades as we post publicly every single trade. Our business model is simple: one-time entry fees of 3% and 20% profit-sharing monthly with no other hidden fees. We trade only on BitMEX exchange. We launched the product in March 2020 and now have AUM of 300.000 Euros.
It was amazing during the Gaines de Boss competition to be mentored by Jean-Philippe Tasle d’Heliand who is the President of ODDO BHF Private Banking which manages AUM of over 100 billion Euros!
