Meet the Game Changers: Transforming Finance and Logistics

The times today are both befuddling and exciting, with entrepreneurs cooking up algorithms that make yesterday's sci-fi look like yesterday's news. Let's meet these digital pioneers who are crazy enough to think they can change the world and just smart enough to actually do it.

So just for, for camera and whatnot, go ahead and say your full name and your title and your business as well.

The emerging innovation hotspot of Kazakhstan brings us Ulzash Zhenkul. He is carving his path in venture capital with a mission to simplify lives. His brainchild, Invest Bank, is a testament to that vision.

I would say it all started with an impulse to make a world better, the world a better place. I would probably start there. I count myself blessed because whatever happened, I was always surrounded by love. But obviously that left a deep mark on me that, you know, world is not ideal. You know, things happen. Every good enterprise takes us to a better world, and that's how I find my calling. And there are many different problems I realized that are going on in the world of investments right now, and I just found one of them that deeply resonates with me and decided that's next, that's what I'm gonna do. May they say, don't shop when you're hungry. The same goes for entrepreneurs. Never operate from a place of fear. My name is Olcay Acıyuncu, and I'm the founder of Invest Diva. An AI-powered digital private banking platform. Our platform is targeting the largest group of investors already as of now, and it's going to keep growing as a percentage of total assets under management, of total available capital in the world.

Dedicated to creating a world where managing your finances feels as easy as scrolling through your phone, Invest Bank is more than just a platform. It's a personal financial advisor in your pocket. Powered by AI, it provides personalized guidance to help you achieve your financial goals.

As we know, money, investments— investments are power. There are many ways to put it. Vote with your wallet. But the simple fact is where money goes, science goes, progress goes, attention goes. In every industry, I think. That's why, you know, I have deep respect for anyone funding innovation, because that's one of the most crucial things we need right now. And we're going to keep needing more of it as the population grows, as the, you know, other challenges creep up. So by targeting that segment and by empowering that segment of investors, by giving them better tools, better information to exercise their choices, Because even if you take a simple shopping experience, how Amazon changed the shopping experience, you have the whole universe at your fingertips and you have tools to analyze that universe. So that's the kind of effect we want to create so that this huge group of investors, that investment powerhouse, has the tools to make better investment decisions and with that put capital Well, entrepreneurship taught me that a lot of the things that we want in life are one or maybe multiple uncomfortable conversations away. So for example, I have a fight with my mom. That is actually one, two, maybe three uncomfortable conversations. The situation might get worse before it gets better, but it is in the— it is an investment in the right trajectory. You have someone you want to talk to about a sale or a fundraise. That's an uncomfortable conversation because potentially there is risk involved, emotional, business risk, depending on who you're talking to. But again, without having that uncomfortable conversation, getting out of your comfort zone— with my wife, we sometimes have fights. It's totally normal. But Building on that is an uncomfortable conversation away. And even if it's not the end result, it's the learning we get from that uncomfortable conversation that's going to get me there. So yeah, most of the things I want in life, they are about having— making that uncomfortable steps and having those uncomfortable conversations.

With Invest Bank, you're not merely managing your money. You're equipping yourself to build a better financial future. Invest Bank is redefining the way we see personal finance.

5,000 people coming, and I think this is going to be one of the greatest events Kazakhstan's ever seen. Already has been, but it's going to be amazing.

And let's not forget, well, Kazakhstan is very far away from the US, but in Kazakhstan, a lot of— even here, a lot of people would know who Mr. Draper is, and having a name like that on the cap table, I'm sure you know that. What's what's that going to mean? We're in a stage where a million dollars would mean a lot because we are right now pre-series A. We'll be series A ready probably mid next year. Million dollars is. And the amount of capital that will help us scale. Scale the amazing platform we've built, scale our sales force, scale the amazing team, product team and engineering team we have. So yeah, it's like, I don't know, we've talked about rockets a second ago. That's like rocket fuel for us. Yeah. Appreciate it.

Company's full name and, you know, elevator pitch, like main, main broad, what do you guys do?

Yep. Okay, so are we—

yeah, I got you.

Whenever you're ready.

Yeah.

From the picturesque heart of Switzerland comes a tech visionary on a mission. Gauthier Villa is redefining the blockchain landscape with XiFi.

A way to create a better world, something that makes more sense to me as a person. Like, for me, it was like a new opportunity to create a better world, to create something which would resonate more to How I envision things and how I envision life as a whole, you know. It's a big revelation in some way. That's why I really got really into this space. So when I was like 23 years old, I had a car accident, and I wasn't the guy, you know, who was like really working hard or studying hard. And when that happened, I think like life, the way I viewed life changed for me. I was like, I'm here for a reason. I need to I need to accomplish something. I need to have a mission to make this place a better place. And I just got really deep into crypto. It was like lightning from, I don't know, from the sky or, you know, from above. And it was like, this is the thing I need to go into. This is the thing I need to get interested in. And it's how like I kept studying, but I was just like, you know, all my free time was like researching on crypto, understanding how the tech works. what it brings. And, you know, like little by little I got into more into this space. Hello, my name is Gautier and we are building XiFi and abstracting gas away from users on-chain. Yeah, so I was studying communication marketing and I discovered Bitcoin and I basically passed most of my time studying this space rather than my studies. And, you know, built an agency while I was studying, helped Web2 and Web3 founders create different types of application databases. And, you know, I got really deeper in the space after my studies, started a YouTube channel. So I used to share like educational content on the subject. I used to do macro analysis for the Crypto Value Association. And, you know, doing all these different things in the space, I've understood the complexity of accessing different types of on-chain opportunities, especially in the DeFi space. So like, you know, creating wallets, accessing tokens on Uniswap or things like that, for me was really simple. But I always had a lot of people like come up to me and say, how can I access this opportunity? How can I do this? How can I do that? And I always had to explain to these people How to create a wallet, how to interact with the dApp, create a private key, a public key. You know, all these things for users in the space like me is very easy. But I saw this particular problem and I wanted to solve that. I wanted to make it easy for anyone to access DeFi in the on-chain world. And this is how I came up with the company which is called OnDeFi. We first started building a DeFi super app, and we've onboarded a lot of users. And one thing we've really understood that was one of the biggest pain points was gas. And so then we preferred to focus on this particular problem, and this is how we came up with XiFi. Been building this for 12 months. So right now, all the users on-chain, whether it's on Ethereum or most of the biggest chains, they always need— like, gas is like the essence Of why there's blockchain, like it's the revenue of the chain itself. It's how like things function right now. There's a way to abstract it, right? If you're using wallets, you're you're on chain. You're always going to need ETH to to do whatever type of transaction you need, and technically you can abstract it. And so we see a future where most of the transaction, most of the users coming on chain will not even know that gas exists. exists, right? It's like today you're using internet, but you don't know how it works. You're just using it. And this is what we need to do. And gas is one of the biggest hurdles. It's one problem that we're solving. There's also a bunch of others like wallet creation, interaction with dApps, like abstracting all the complexities to interact with different applications and gas eventually. And so we're focused on a very particular problem, on a very specific niche. And we see a future where This can be abstracted and will be abstracted.

XiFi is more than just a tool. It's setting new standards, a reality where using blockchain technology is as easy as paying with your phone. Thanks to Gauthier's ingenious work, complex blockchain processes are now seamless for individuals and businesses alike.

What would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper do for you right now?

I think it would be nice to have people who have more broader experience in other businesses and have seen many different types of use cases, not only crypto. And that, I think, would also help the business because as a crypto founder, you always want to get the most technical folks on board, whether it's in your round or around you. But sometimes I think it's good to have people who have like a better understanding of how business works in general. And I think this is what, what Tim Draper could, could bring to, to us and what we potentially would need.

It's like having a personal assistant for your digital transactions. ZyFi is propelling the world toward a more unified and accessible digital era.

I'm here with Meet the Drapers. By the River Seine, watching the joggers go by.

Yeah, $1 million would enable to have an integration team. So for every protocol or wallet we're talking to, there's a lot of time that is demanded for our team to explain how to integrate our products into theirs. So we need a dedicated team that could help and enable easy integration. Easy integrations with all the partners we're working with. Yeah, I mean, look, the problem we're solving is one of the biggest in the space, right? It's gas. For all those who are like really into crypto, they know like what gas is, how complex it is to manage. And this is something that needs— that will be abstracted in the future. I mean, the whole industry is working into that direction. This is something we solved, and we know that amongst the, the other projects that were there, that we already have like some, some market fit and are already working with some of the biggest projects out there. So this is why I think you guys should vote me back.

Thank you. Just, you introduce yourself, your full name, your company's name, and just like a couple sentences, like elevator pitch, like broadest version of what you guys are working on.

Okay.

In the ever-evolving blockchain world, connecting different networks has always been a bit of a puzzle. But Sumit Kishore, the brilliant mind behind ActorLink, is solving it right from merry old London.

So you utilize, you use, you leverage the entire power of Web3 ecosystem without losing the security. But do we have people in the market who are building such products? Answer is kind of no. Nothing can go wrong beyond certain limits. Like if you have $10, can you lose $20? No, you only can lose what you already have. So once you understand this part, you kind of do not worry so much. Once you have enough knowledge about work and about processes, about companies, about the job, you know, you always can go back and build these kind of things again. But there's new opportunities very few people try to take, and I just wanted to jump onto something and be a part of this new big change. Well, it is certainly not my first project, but I have built multiple products in Web3. I'm product lead at ConsenSys, which is one of the leading blockchain technology firms in the world. They have one of the best wallets, and while working with them, I founded internally an anti-money laundering product, you know, to catch bad actors crypto world. I built an index fund and I built other products, and everything what I did was zero-to-one, which means everything which I built was sort of my idea and I took it from the ground and then I built it and brought it to the market. So, so I have built products in this fashion, but nothing as like my own company. My name is Sumit Kishore. I'm the founder of Actalink. Actalink is providing smart wallet and programmable operations powered by account abstraction. Around 2015-16, I got introduced to blockchain and I got to understand that this is going to build a new financial ecosystem. I knew that, okay, with time almost everything will be rebuilt in this new— with this new technology. So with that faith in this technology, I just quit Bank of New York job or Bonny Mellon job and I just Jumped into Web3, and since last 7 years I'm working here.

Imagine trading NFTs or even playing games across blockchains, all with just a few taps. That's the future ActorLink is shaping, making blockchain simple, seamless, and accessible for everyone.

Let's say I call it Web0. Web0, when you were keeping the money under the pillow. Yeah, that was the storage. Web 1, you were keeping the money in the bank, but you were interacting the money, making the money interact with the world through checkbooks. Then Web 2 came, everybody got the Visa card, online banking debit card. And now Web 3 came when it is going back to you, where the storage of funds is actually in your hand, which is so-called non-custodial wallets. So you can keep your money in your pocket by yourself and nobody has has the right to take it away from you. And this is great. So I like this idea where you have control of your own funds. And now with this idea, it comes with a lot of challenges, regulatory challenges, but also functional challenges. You cannot function, you cannot do day-to-day things with such complex process of Web3 wallets, which is what Akta Link is Solving. The current financial system has a lot of loopholes, has potential of corruption, and it is effective, it is fast now, but it can be a lot better. Using Web3 technology, you can bring the power back and distribute among the people. Nobody teaches how the money works, how How the money has been created, how money has been stored, how money is interacting, who is actually responsible for what kind of features and who play what kind of role. So now if the people will have a choice, thanks to non-custodial wallet and thanks to ACTA Link, they can even program it, then they have the control.

ACTA Link takes the complexity out of the equation, letting you transfer assets, make transactions, and use apps across blockchains Without breaking a sweat.

I believe any good company or any good process is simply a result of great people, great leadership, great knowledge. And for us, it is very important to have Tim on board with us. You know, the kind of impact that we want to make, we want to create We really need someone like Tim, you know, with his access, with his knowledge, with his understanding of the global market at the macro level. Payments is a very sensitive thing. It's everybody's money. So, so this is why I think this is the most important thing for us just to have Tim on board.

Westminster, but we're in front of a really cool old palace here. And, and this is really extraordinary.

Well, a million-dollar investment would do— just make life a little bit more easier for me. I'm from, you know, India. I'm like a middle sibling. I'm a very budget, simple guy. So I, I think everyone knows that if I would have a little bit more money, you know, then it will ease my pocket and I would be able to pay my people a little bit more, you know. get more people to do— like right now we have a lot of leads, but we just do not have manpower to close the leads, you know. So getting more manpower and to the current manpower just pay a little bit more money, you know. How can you make a product that people did— like, that's the best thing happened to me. And for that, yes, you need money because, you know, not everybody wants to buy your story. People also need money. So the capital is really required.

If we could start out with an introduction, your full name, your role at the company, the company name, and then just kind of like an elevator pitch, just sort of a concise explanation Got it.

Okay.

The bustling tech scene of the East Coast brings us Demetrius Kalkatos. Demetrius isn't just building the future, he's also making it easier to access.

A lot of it has to really do with perseverance. I mean, it's really, you know, you know, showing up and being, being present is 9/10 of the battle. of it and being perseverant and being good about following up and making sure that you're diligent about taking care of your people, listening to your people, because everybody has a voice, everybody has an opinion, and everybody's contributing to the success of your organization. It's not just me. So I want to spend time with my CTO, with my biz dev folks, with my engineering folks, with my node operations folks. Operations folks, and just everyone that contributes to the success of Expand and understanding how their journey is going. People want to be treated with dignity, kindness, and respect. People, no matter if it's a janitor cleaning my store or if it's someone on the front line serving people, you have to treat everybody the same. My name is Dimitrios Galkotis. Everybody calls me Dimo. I'm the CEO of Expand.network. Expand is an API middleware connector API that allows you to trade in DeFi and source your trading data. Our job is to help people scale, right? Our job is to be that outsourced infrastructure provider that allows you to connect to our APIs, use our REST APIs, use our WebSockets. And streaming capabilities to allow you to scale to provide the services that you want to offer to your customers. Those firms can't do everything themselves. When you look at Web3 and DeFi and stablecoins and tokenization of assets, there's many components. It's massively immense. It's extremely fragmented. There's trading components, there's lending components, there's staking components. There's data components. There's portfolio management components. To provide all those different components on the backend for you organically is hard to do. So we want to provide firms that want to, that are wallet providers, trading platforms, OMS, EMS trading systems, trading terminals, anybody within the digital asset ecosystem, the capability to scale and provide swaps, lending, borrowing, staking, and the data that they want for their customers' ease of use. Because if they're managing a front end, they're working on the UI/UX, they're working on simplicity of how it makes it easier for customers to use that front end. If they provide a custody platform or a wallet platform, they're working on their governance systems to make sure it's easy for people to do the things that they want to do within their wallet ecosystem. They don't have the dev team to scale up all the backend stuff that is needed that they want to provide to the customers, and that's where we come into play.

His creation, Expand.network, is a translator for the world of blockchain. Expand.network tears down barriers, empowering developers to collaborate and create across different platforms effortlessly.

What I saw within the DeFi and digital assets world and blockchain blockchain world was a lot of the same things that they were trying to make better and enhance in a Web3 world. So a lot of the skill sets that we had in, in running financial markets and running exchanges definitely correlated into that, that world, right? Whether it's a custodial platform, how do I get access to the data, are we providing trading infrastructure, are people getting best price, best execution, and that's really what Expand is all about, is really making sure people have access to price discovery, speed of execution, certainty of execution, and making sure that they're not getting any attacks and the man-in-the-middle attacks or any type of people trying to front-run them in any way, shape, or form. So we've got a lot to do in the Web3 world that will simulate the efficiencies of a traditional market. And where you see that, and we're moving forward to that. So that attracted me to kind of hop into the space and see, can my traditional financial experience correlate and assimilate into this Web3 DeFi blockchain world? And it does.

Easy, secure, and efficient.

With Expand.network, developers can focus on innovation, not wrestling with complex code, making the future of The opportunity to work with Tim and the Draper Association would be super exciting for the Expand.network team. Seeing the, the success and the continued success that they've had in the investments that they've made over the time and the commitment that they're making to the digital asset space is paramount and leading edge, and having them on my cap table and a part of driving the success and leveraging their knowledge of what they've learned from other investments from their Portco companies and how we can work together in that ecosystem would be a huge opportunity for the Expand team and a huge way to build, continue to build our business and drive success.

Who's your first phone call if you win?

My first phone call if I win will probably be my wife. A million-dollar investment in Expand would help us a great deal. We are in the middle of raising our seed round of financing right now. We're looking to raise $5 million in our seed investment, so having the opportunity to work with the Draper team and get that million-dollar commitment would go a long way to having an excellent investment. investor as part of our seed round.