Blockchain professional network SpringRole has closed a $1.3 million private placement and has set a May 15 date for the public pre-sale of SPRING, an ERC-20 compliant token that ties a value incentive to verifying career information like educational attainment, work history and skills endorsements. Public sales of the SPRING token are scheduled to launch at the end of June.
Early investors in SpringRole include AlphaBlock Investments, DNA (Brock Pierce and Scott Walker's blockchain investment and consulting firm), Isaac Lee's BlockWater and Wavemaker Genesis.
Scott Walker, co-founder of DNA and an early SpringRole backer, said, “SpringRole is taking an important and risk-managed approach to solving a massive problem in the HR industry globally. By focusing on India, where they have already had success—and where the problem is particularly acute—SpringRole has an excellent opportunity to capture market share quickly and build a set of blockchain and API standards that can open them to additional opportunities as they grow.”
SpringRole is solving the challenges of hiring technical professionals, especially in countries like India, for outsourcing and global services arrangements by using blockchain coupled with an incentive-based utility token for attestation of educational and certification attainment, validation of work history and scoring of professional network referrals for skill sets. The company is executing on an aggressive product roadmap, targeting a general availability rollout over the course of this summer. The company's goal is initially to penetrate the Indian market for technical professionals, which will make SpringRole a valuable asset to U.S. and European companies that are setting up offshore capabilities in India.
“What we're building is solving an all-too-real problem faced by every offshore company hiring in India, whether in support of in-house technical services or as part of an outsourcing transaction. Opening our beta to U.S. users is a key next step in bringing our industrial application of blockchain to a global market.” —Kartik Mandaville, founder and CEO, SpringRole
According to Everest Group, the total Indian IT-BPO industry is valued at approximately $154 billion annually. The firm expects the industry will grow by up to nine percent by 2019.
“We invest in the most innovative blockchain companies around the world, and the approach Kartik and his team are taking is an ideal fit for our portfolio,” said Richard Li, general partner at AlphaBlock. “Their approach to what will be a massive market opportunity is smart, leverages their established market presence and puts them in a position to gather critical insights from a large user base.”
Founded and led by Kartik Mandaville, SpringRole, a Science Blockchain portfolio company, is building the first professional reputation network powered by artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to eliminate fraud from user profiles. The network will give more weight to online professional reputation and will make it possible for people to be rewarded for their endorsements.
SpringRole is building features like directory listing, search, job board, work attestation and reputation scoring on the SpringRole platform. SpringRole has launched a referral program which enables beta users to invite their network onto the platform in exchange for SPRING tokens.
SpringRole also recently announced product partnerships with WorkCoin, a blockchain-based platform for freelancers with a focus on transparency, and Bloom, a blockchain-based credit scoring platform. In February, Rick Marini, managing partner at Protocol Ventures, and Alex Waters, co-founder of ELM Labs, joined as advisors. Waters was an early member of the Bitcoin ecosystem. He has worked full-time on blockchain since 2010, including co-founding Coin.co and creating Coin Apex.
