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When the Covid pandemic was raging in 2020, much of the world was in lockdown and many more businesses were closing down.
But Sanjay Bandare did the unexpected: he decided to quit his comfortable day time job and co-found a startup in the midst of a pandemic and the worst economic crisis faced by his country Sri Lanka since its independence.
Sanjay’s blockchain startup, VRRB, had just two people, him and his co-founder Andrew Smith at the start of 2021. Fast forward to 2022, Sanjay and Andrew have been joined by their third co-founder Shiva Kintali, and their startup now employees 8 highly paid web3 engineers.
“A lot of people actually told us that it’s a very bold move to create a new blockchain in the current market, while most business were either laying off employees or closing down entirely [during the pandemic],” he added.
But that was a “well-calculated” move for VRRB.
We know that this is the time for us to actually prepare … to make sure that after the pandemic and recession, we have something that helps individuals secure their assets
Sanjay Bandare
Co-Founder and COO of VRRB Labs Inc
Looking far ahead turned out to be the right move for the 31-year-old and his co-founder Andrew. Through the pandemic, in the year 2021, Sanjay and Andrew spent their free time collaborating together online, working from two different ends of the world and building a fresh, new, faster and more secure consensus algorithm for a new layer 1 blockchain.
Since 2022, VRRB has raised an undisclosed amount in the millions, and drawn an impressive list of venture capital investors and partners.
Meeting his Co-Founder Online
The idea for VRRB came from Andrew Smith, whom Sanjay met through an online discussion forum for global entrepreneurs.
Sanjay instantly recognized the value in Andrew’s proposition and began discussing how VRRB could potentially push the world of blockchain and web3 forwards. Their discussions grew into daily meetings, which often took place in the middle of the night to account for the time difference between the United States and Sri Lanka, which were on opposite corners of the world.
Sanjay would complete his day job, and get on meetings with Andrew, who was a seasoned entrepreneur having already launched a previous data company. They discussed potential ideas and started working together on building a POC for VRRB that could be shown to potential investors.
Both blockchain enthusiasts realized that the consensus algorithm that was being proposed by VRRB did not exist in the current blockchain landscape.
“There was lot of potential with what was being proposed for the Proof Of Concept, and both of us knew it,” said Sanjay
“There wasn’t a blockchain that had it all — they were either sacrificing security for speed or sacrificing speed for security. VRRB was on the path to solving both these issues”
Onboarding a third co-founder and interest from venture capital.
Sanjay and Andrew managed to tirelessly work through the nights and their free times to bring the VRRB POC to fruition. But like many POCs it was riddled with bugs and required the collective effort of an entire development team to get it to the standard they expected.
In 2022, they began their search for the third co-founder of VRRB, who would ultimately be Shiva Kintali, a PhD holder specializing in cryptography and who now acts as the CTO of VRRB Labs Inc.
With the development of the POC, VRRB, lead by CEO Andrew Smith, reached out to potential venture capital firms for investment and managed to raise an undisclosed amount in capital to develop and further the VRRB blockchain.
VRRB now employs 8 highly skilled web3 blockchain engineers globally.
Building an ‘ecosystem’
VRRB started off as a layer one blockchain, but the three co-founders have bigger dreams.
VRRB aims to go beyond the blockchain and online cryptocurrency world. VRRB’s aim is to create an ecosystem, bridging the crypto world with real world applications and economics, beyond online.
VRRB also wants to become a platform for developers to easily be able to develop in their native languages instead of having to learn an entirely new language to code in, which currently is stifling the development of web3 applications.
The “coding journey” for web3 developers has to go beyond learning a new language just to code on one blockchain platform, said Sanjay.
The drive to make VRRB successful and to bridge the crypto economy with current real world applications come from Sanjay’s own personal experience.
Sanjay was born and raised in Sri Lanka, a tiny island nation off the southern coast of India, which after the pandemic of 2020 faced its worst economic crisis since its independence in 1948.
Due to careless economic policies brought on by the central bank and government of Sri Lanka, its currency value dropped and depreciated significantly against the USD within a span of six months in the year 2022. Sanjay believes this could have been avoided and the people of Sri Lanka could have secured their savings if they had been more accustomed to a country that was ready to accept cryptocurrencies.
Company : VRRB Labs Inc
Contact Name : Sanjay Bandare
Email : [email protected]
Country : United States
Source: Story.KISSPR.com
Release ID: 438933