Founders Spotlight: Intake
Student Venture Associate Michael Riley had a chance to virtually sit down with cohort members Gregory Rocco, Wayne Change, and Jacob Blish of Intake. Intake’s mission is to help small and medium enterprises collect documents and automate their document workflows to reduce their costs while improving both their security and scalability.
For the past three years, Gregory Rocco, Jacob Blish, and Wayne Chang were colleagues in the digital assets group of ConsenSys, a blockchain software company focused on Ethereum. After witnessing the challenges of internal asset organization first hand, they began to question the feasibility of maintaining asset and credential ownership in an interoperable and complex marketplace. Questions around the control of individual digital identities were top of mind as the team began to explore new classes of digital assets through secure document collection. Slowly Intake began to coalesce and after 3 years of professional collaboration at ConsenSys, they decided to make the leap to working full time on this venture.
Intake’s mission is to help small and medium enterprises collect documents and automate their document workflows to reduce their costs while improving both their security and scalability. Through the customer discovery process, the team discovered that the reality of issuing assets using blockchain technology eliminates the inefficiencies of paper-based systems. In speaking with a wide range of professionals, they observed a strong need for efficient document management on both sides of the table.
To meet these needs, co-founder Wayne Chang explained that maintaining focus is extremely important for their team. Their philosophy for success is to “tighten [their] focus until [they] have a concrete product that solves this problem.”
This ethic was one of the contributing factors to their interest in the Columbia | IBM Blockchain Accelerator. The program places a heavy emphasis on finding product-market fit through interacting with a wide range of potential customers thereby understanding their most pressing needs. On their motivation to join the program, Chang said “[The] Important part was to get as close to prospective customers and understand them and their problems. This was vital. We knew the combination of L2M and mentorship from IBM would be really helpful.”
Through the accelerator program, team Intake has learned different approaches to problem solving using blockchain technology from IBM mentors and have understood the value of the network the program has opened for them.
With the program nearing its conclusion, Intake is looking to raise funding to extend their runway and allow continued work on this project full-time. They look forward to learning from their expanding network of industry experts and prospective clients that face common struggles of maintaining control of digital assets and verified users.