 Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for this meetup session. We have Sid. Sid is the founder of StatPig. StatPig provides a solution called the vaccine ledger, which helps organizations and which helps manufacturers to track the blockchain solution, helps to track their supply chain for distribution of vaccines. So, Sid, hopefully we can give some more details about StatPig and about yourself and how you entered into this space and then maybe we can then dive right in into the presentation. Okay. Hey, thanks. Hey, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. And thanks. Thanks. I apologize for inviting me for this, for this talk. Quite exciting. And yeah. So, as I said, as I'm based in Hyderabad, we are a startup which incubated in the hub, we're still in the hub. And although we have to do this online now, but otherwise you would have been meeting somewhere and sharing this in a more personal environment. But yeah, nevertheless, it's exciting to see so many people interested in the session, especially because of what's happening. I think that there's a lot of relevance in terms of what we're doing in this space and what's happening with COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. So I'm quite excited about this session. Let me start sharing my screen so that I can go into more details about it. Okay, great. So, as I said, so we started in Hyderabad and so I will, so we are a team which sits in T-Hub. We are around 15 people right now. We had quite a good journey. So for the agenda, what I have is basically throw some lights on how we started, what was our journey so far, what was the difficulties that we faced during our journey. And so that will not only set some stage, but also for anyone in the group who wants to start their own business in the space, particularly from a Hyderabad point of view, that would probably be useful. Then I will jump into vaccines, the topic of the day, give you my perspective on, so we've been spending, I mean, it's been four years since we started working in the vaccine space. Right now, no one else combines the domain knowledge around vaccines with the technologies like blockchain and IoT like we do in the industry. So that is the reason that why we had a lot of fractions. So I will share some of those insights around vaccines and how that all that became quite relevant with COVID-19 vaccines, especially right now, and how we are emerging as one of the dominant players in the vaccine distribution technologies right now. I'll also jump into what our solution is, how it ensures both quality and safety of vaccines. And then we can, from there, we can take questions or we can, if you want me to go in a particular direction, either on the technology side or on the more on the business side, I would be very happy to do so. So that's the agenda I have and let's start right away. So as I said, we started in 2000, kind of around 2000, end of 2016 or early 2017, but we had some tremendous traction in this space, not just due to the COVID-19, but also before COVID-19, we, our solution was one of the most, one of the successful implementation of blockchain technology in the supply chains. Our first pilot was in 2017, very early days of blockchain. There were a lot of case studies written on some of our pilots by UC Berkeley and several other organizations. We've been covered in several news channels and had a very good journey so far, a lot of ups and downs, but we were able to make consistent progress in this space even. So this is not just, not considered in the COVID-19 and how it has accelerated the whole, the market. So, and during these last four years, we've built very strong partners, channel partners and organizational partners. For example, we're funded by UNICEF, a member of GAVI, the World Economic Forum Global Innovator, been part of several accelerators and been supported by large organizations like NASDAQ and the CIE and Facebook. So there's few, few locals missing here, but over the years, we have gained a lot of validation from multiple organizations, very large scale organizations at a global level. And so this has kind of been making incremental progress. One of the things that we have done over the past few years is matured along with the technology because many of you might know that blockchain was in a very nascent stage when we started back in 2017. It was mostly theoretical. It was very hard to prove the value proposition in a real setup in a practical environment. So the overall evolution of the technology has been very slow. It's mostly been on paper, but nothing in the real world. So and we kind of matured as the technology matured and we like migrated from early VOCs to large scale deployments. So this has been our journey. So it started with me moving back from U.S. I was working in Bay Area before in California. So I was working for Bay Area companies like Cisco, mostly in emerging technology space. So my role there was looking at new technologies, understanding how those would create impact to the products that our company had, how we can build new products and push them into the market so that we have a fair advantage over competitors. So that experience was very helpful for me when I started this startup because it revolved around basically like what product would work in the market, what would a customer need. So that experience I mostly gained through my experience work experience in the Bay Area. So when I moved back in 2016 to India, so I spent a lot of time understanding different industries. I wanted to set up my business here in Hyderabad, primarily because I'm from Hyderabad. So if I go back, I would have chosen Bangalore or some other place because Hyderabad is a very different place to set up a startup. Primarily due to the very limited capital that is available for startups. So you have enough resources, you have engineers and you can, there are some industries where you can find clients. But one of the most essential thing for a startup is investment. And Hyderabad is a very difficult place to find investments. And the startup ecosystem is not as mature as the other cities like Delhi or Bangalore. So you will see very few, if not any, I mean, I don't see there's any unicorn which came out of here primarily due to the restrictions around how difficult it is to raise capital. So if I had to start one more time, I would probably do two things. So one is, so this is an advice or this is like my experience from my perspective to other entrepreneurs in the community. So what I would have done is two things and done it in two different ways. One is probably set up in Bangalore, which is the closest major startup hub, or still have a base here in Hyderabad but spend a lot of time in Bangalore and Delhi. So maybe travel there at least two days a week to meet investors, develop, build a community, participate in a community and something like that. So that's probably a good, I think if some of you are on your way to start a business, so I would definitely encourage you to do that. But if you are working in some unique areas, there's definitely scope here as well. So you can find some good investors at an angel level and early seed stages where you can raise some capital. So you have to have some innovative ideas and some good traction in order to get some funding. So that's been my 2016, I spent most of my time, at that time 2016 you can imagine very early stages of startup seeing over here in Hyderabad. I mean there were still good companies but in the blockchain area, I think this was, many people haven't even heard about it. So what I did is spent a lot of time meeting industries, traditional industries here, understanding what their problems are. So spent a lot of that year defining my problem statement, understanding where exactly the pain points are and understanding what a customer needs. So it came up with a solution in early 2017. So that's when it took at least six months for me to understand the problem in detail and come up with a solution. The solution was not perfect. So it matured over these years but it has largely been very close to what I started back in 2017. So I think like for any business, any startup you would need patience. So it will take anywhere between three to four years for you to get maturity, product maturity and a lot of iterations. So you would need to change a lot of things. The product that we have now is very different from what we had in early 2017. So that's 2017 was very interesting. We got selected to an accelerator in Singapore. I spent six months in Singapore. That opened a lot of new opportunities. So I built a lot of connections there. I was able to attract few clients from that Singapore market. So that was a very interesting year and we did our first POC. So our first POC was in coastal Andhra tracking fish from this fishing villages primarily a village called Antarvedi. I don't know if anyone here is from that particular part of the state. But we were tracking fish from going to Singapore and Dubai providing the classic use case of blockchain, right, prominence. So we were basically capturing the data in terms of where the fish originated who captured it. And that was a very successful one of the early prominence projects. There was one other company which was doing that at that time in UK. So we were quite early from that perspective. So that kind of attracted a lot of other organizations to us. So we got selected to a couple of US accelerators in 2018. Our first annual contract came in early 2018. So we started generating revenue from late 2017 because even 2017 we had some revenues coming in from Dubai in terms of pilots. But our full annual contract started in 2018. So which was a good year. So we were quite excited. I moved to US because we got selected to a couple of US accelerators. So one is one in San Francisco called ETC Labs, which is Ethereum Classic Labs. So it's run by Ethereum Classic, the ETC. And the other one was in Connecticut. It's called Hartford Insurance Tech Hub. It was run by Startup Bootcamp, very popular startup accelerator, quite renowned that they have accelerators all over the world. But this one was more focused around insurance industry because insurance industry, after bank, there were a lot of use cases of blockchain in banking sector. So insurance industry was also very keen on looking at the technology and understanding the use cases there. So we got selected to that. So those were quite interesting. So I spent half of my year in the East Coast and then half of the rest of the year in the West Coast. So both parts of the country. And we got our first funding through UNICEF. So because our solution was quite interesting, we did some pilots in the vaccine space. And that was very interesting to UNICEF. So UNICEF, for those who don't know, is the largest distributor of vaccines in the world. So UNICEF distributes nearly four billion doses of vaccine each year. So as you know, UNICEF is an organization for children, a UN organization. And so their focus has primarily been for vaccines for children. So I mean, vaccines in general were not, people COVID-19, they were not for adults. It was primarily for children. And you also have veterinary vaccines, which is more catered towards what you call animals. But yeah, so those were the two categories. So we started working with UNICEF, selected us through their innovation fund, six companies got selected globally. We are the only Indian company which got selected. So big year, first funding, and it's an equity-free fund. So we didn't lose any investment, sorry, we didn't lose any stake in the company for that investment. So yeah, that kind of skyrocketed our journey pretty quick because UNICEF then introduced us to a lot of different teams all around the world in Middle East and Central Asia. So which basically helped us to develop our product in 2019 called Vaccine Ledger. So in 2000, last year itself, we had this product called Vaccine Ledger, which was successfully deployed in multiple countries, was used for tracking vaccines in the supply chain. And we also received support from GAVI, which is a very big organization in the vaccines world, which is, which has started in 2000, I think, so it's a $8 billion fund, which supports immunization projects all around the world. So because because our focus shifted around vaccines, one of the best countries to be in to handle this business was in India because India is the largest producer of vaccines, 60% of the global vaccines are manufactured here. So it made sense for me to again pack my bags, move back to India in 2019, and start working focusing more on UNICEF, GAVI, and the rest of the particular ecosystem. So 2020, everyone knows COVID happened, like everyone, we kind of slowed down as well. But from early stages, we started to, I mean, everyone around us also started to notice that we are one of the most important innovation that has happened in the vaccines world in the past two or three years. So suddenly, there has been a lot of interest from like around, I would say, from April, April, May this year, because everyone else, everything else before was focused around lockdowns and things like that, only from April and May, that's when the the vaccine was started, and everyone started to realize, hey, I mean, distribution will be will be a big challenge. So so that's when we started to see, I mean, we found like a lot of traction in this in this space. So that's so that's a little bit about us and our journey. I hope this set some stage in terms of where we came and came from and how we started. And so I wanted to share this journey, primarily because, like, if like many entrepreneurs in this group, they might be so if we don't show the shared entire journey, I think that there would be misconceptions that this would be fairly easy, or it would be a very quick solution that you can bring to the market, but it's very complicated blockchain, particularly from compared to other technologies is a is a very difficult technology to implement. So I think, I think so it's a needs collective efforts. If someone is starting start looking at collaborations in this space, rather than trying to do everything on your own. So that's, that's one piece of, I think, suggestion, I would say, not an advice, but suggestion that I would give to anyone who is starting at this point in their in their business. So, so vaccines, right? What's so different about them? So why did we fix vaccines not and not any other, like medicine, for example, so why not start medicine? So vaccines have some unique capabilities or unique characteristics, which makes it very interesting. So first of all, it's a biological product, right? So life sciences industry is split into two verticals, one is pharmaceutical, and the other is biotechnology. So, vaccines come under biotechnology. So these are biological products, and they work in a different way compared to a regular medicine. So a regular medicine is or antibiotics, they're basically designed to tackle attack the disease directly. So they basically go and like, if you have some sort of infection, so they will start working on that virus that is creating infection directly to get you back to normal as soon as possible. When it comes to vaccines, vaccines, what they do is basically enable your immune system. So what that means is, so they kind of introduce a foreign antigen into your body. So that kind of starts triggering your immune system. It creates antibodies in your system. So that will fight against the virus or bacteria that is caused by a disease like COVID-19. So it works in a very different way. It's a biological product. What that means is basically it has an expiry date, which is much lower than regular medicines. So because this is a biological product, it has the live organisms, protein elements, other components, which can go back very quickly. So the shelf life of this product is very low. So the product itself has something called APIs. So these are not software APIs. So these are active pharmaceutical ingredients. So that's the that's the full form of API. So API is nothing but basically a vaccine is a combination of different ingredients. So these ingredients are called APIs. So these are basically the raw materials or the viruses which are required to create a vaccine. And then the last term that you should be familiar with is called something called cold chain. Cold chain, nothing to do with blockchain. So it is basically a supply chain term. What it basically means is the product has to be stored and transported under certain temperature ranges. So if the temperature becomes too high, the product gets damaged. So an interesting point which I didn't know, which I only learned when I was working in this field was it's not just high temperatures which spoil the product. It's also the low temperatures. So you might be wondering like why low temperatures, right? So in some countries, let's say Kazakhstan and other areas, the temperature drops to minus 20 degrees centigrade. So it's very cold in most of the Siberia and that particular region. So what happens is the products freeze and when they freeze, the chemical composition of the product changes. So when you unfreeze them, so it's no longer efficient. So that's one of the reasons. So both low temperatures and high temperatures causes damage to the vaccines. I wish I could see you guys. I don't know if you guys are finding it interesting, but let me know in the chat. We had a fine, negative thing for that. Very, very interesting for us. Yeah. Meanwhile, can we take some questions? Yes, absolutely. Yes. So guys, if you have any questions, please unmute yourself and you can ask the question. Yeah, there are a few questions in Q&A. One or two I have replied privately, but Sid is the right person to answer. Yeah, you can pick it up. Okay, so where are they? So yeah, I see them in open questions. Is that the one? Yeah, I said questions as well. Yeah. In the bottom, you can see Q&A. Okay. Cool. I see, yeah. So I see a couple of questions. What is the meaning of static? Okay, yeah. Cool. So no meaning. Just like Google and Apple, which means nothing. I mean, Apple means a fruit, but it's not really about selling fruits. We started static just to make it something interesting to, just an interesting name. So, but it has an element of statistics and like Twig, Twig is like a new branch of statistics. So kind of originated from that. But beyond that, I wouldn't, so we stopped bothering about what the name means. So it's just another name, fancy name, that start-ups we found at the start-up. Sorry, it's technical architecture and recommendation type one last message. Is there any regulatory body to ensure vaccines and transportation properly as per norms and are the vaccines tested upon delivery? Okay. So yeah, that's a very interesting question. So yes, there are regulatory bodies. Let me talk about this in detail. So what happens? This slide, let me share this slide. So this kind of gives you a journey of the product. So each country has a regulator. So in every country, there is a regulator who regulates distribution and manufacturing of all pharmaceutical products and biotechnology products. So by that I mean all life sciences product. So with vaccines, let me give you some idea of how the vaccine manufacturing happens. So a lot of ingredients that I talked about, APIs, so they might get manufactured in China. So China is the largest manufacturer of APIs, active pharmaceutical ingredients. The reason why China is so dominant is it's very cheap to get these products manufactured in China. In other countries, creating these ingredients is highly regulated because you have to comply with pollution norms. So these products involve a lot of pollution, to be really honest. So you have to comply with pollution norms. So it's in Europe or North America to manufacture these products. It's very expensive, obviously, because there's so much compliance and no one wants you to create these products next year, next year at town, and then dump them into the viewers or whatever. So for obvious reasons, China has become the most cheapest and is a dominant player in the international market to create these products. So these are just ingredients, right? So this is not a finished product. So after these ingredients are created, the world's biggest manufacturer in terms of vaccines is India. So India manufactures a close to 60% of global volume of vaccines. So that's close to around, I think, 68 billion doses each year. So that's how much India manufactures. And you would be thinking, okay, so this is a large industry, hundreds of companies, it's actually not. So there's a handful of companies in India which manufacture these volumes, so to speak. And interestingly, Hyderabad is the biggest hub in India where the vaccines are manufactured. So if you go to on the ORR, if you take a ride and you will hit a place called Genome Valley, most of us would have not gone there. I never went there before entering this industry. So it's an area where you will find all the vaccine companies and even the pharmaceutical companies. So that's where these vaccines get manufactured. So we are sitting very close to where the vaccines get manufactured. So that's another interesting fact. So my destination icons have shifted. So the icons should be on China and India, but they're moved a little bit, sorry about that. So you can picture that. So ingredients start in China and finished goods starts, gets prepared in India. Due to trade war between China and India, now there's talks that there will be more ingredients getting manufactured in India, but I don't know if it's good or bad, especially from a coalition perspective. So that's something that government should take care of. But then, okay, so we have to finish good, what happens then, right? So this two world is divided into two countries, rich countries and poor countries, right? So rich countries have no problem buying vaccines. So they pay, so they usually don't buy from Indian companies directly. So they buy from European manufacturers or American manufacturers who manufacture their product in India. It's kind of like Apple creating all their cell phones in China, right? So you have these big pharma companies whose headquarters are in Europe and North America, but they get some of the manufacturing done from India. So the products go to where they put the label on them and then they sell it to the rich countries. Then there is the other side of the world, which is lower income and middle income countries. This is most of the North America, a little bit of South America, Southeast Asia, and also India comes into this category. India is interesting when it comes to vaccine because we have such a large domestic manufacturing. So we can buy directly. So we don't go through another agency. But for the rest of the countries, they procure through UNICEF and GABI. So UNICEF and GABI basically what they do is so they basically pool all countries under one demand and they buy on their behalf. So that way they get the best price compared to rich countries. So the vaccine is not priced equally in all countries. So rich countries pay more anywhere between, let's say if your vaccine costs $1 in poor country, the same vaccine will cost around $10 in a rich country. So they pay more because obviously they have more cash. So it's not a problem. So that's how this is probably an interesting fact that you might not know. But that's how the world is divided. And that's going to be very important when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines because everyone knows there is research going on with these news about new vaccines coming out. But not everyone is going to get them at the same time. So the world is divided into rich and poor. So the rich get them quicker. They already paid, most countries already paid for these vaccines in advance. So they get them early and the other countries will probably get them sometime end of next year or maybe in 2022. We don't know. So that's the world that we live in. But there are organizations like Gavi and Covax. So there is a new treaty in the world that's happening called Covax facility. So you can do research on that. But what it's basically doing is ensuring that there is a fair distribution of vaccines so that people don't, countries don't fight with each other on this. But overall, its vaccines are very global. It's a global supply chain, quite fragmented and complex. So there's a lot of issues around visibility and transparency. So let me... So this is where we are getting into the problems. So this is where we are getting into what's the problem with the vaccine supply chain and how are we building a solution to solve this problem? So the first big problem is visibility. So when you say visibility, what does that mean? So we don't know where these products are when they are shipped. So a manufacturer creates these products and they ship them and there is no tracking which tracks them like every step of the supply chain today. So because these vaccines end up in multiple countries, nearly 100 countries, right? More than 100 countries. Now it's very hard to have visibility of where the products are, what condition they are in and all that stuff. Then there is a lack of transparency. Okay, so if someone is getting vaccines through a back door or you have vaccines selling through the black market or vaccines getting... Well, supposed to sell in India but they got stolen and sold in Africa at a higher price. All these things are a huge problem in the vaccine world. You have no traceability of where the product came from. There is some traceability but not a lot. So that creates a lot of challenges. One of the biggest that I already talked about is cold chain failures. Cold chain failure is a temperature failure in the supply chain as the product moves. So a lot of you in the audience would be automatically guessing about sensors, how you can use sensors to track temperature, collect the data. So you are going in the right direction. So those are the solutions which have been in place for a long time and most of the sensors existed for the last to 10, 15 years. So its sensors are not new but the only problem is they were not IoT. So the difference between sensors and IoT is sensors collect data. So even a thermometer is a sensor because it's sensors your temperature, body temperature, but it's not transmitting that data somewhere. So it's not that the thermometer is not sending that to internet and some algorithm is calculating how your temperature is increasing when you will get fever and all that interesting things are not happening. So that's the difference between an actual sensor and IoT. And if you're already guessing that solution in your mind, then you're going in the right direction. Then you have other products like expired products. And now you might think, okay, what's the big deal about expired product, right? So that's one of the major outages in the vaccine space because all the governments buy them in bulk. So you get maybe 10 million doses of vaccine at a time and they sit in the warehouse like maybe two or three million doses get expired after a while. People don't realize that so you take your child to a hospital. You may check the label for expiry date if you are smart, but if you are not smart or if you don't know how to read or if you don't know that you should check the expiry date, then you might end up getting an expired vaccine, which is quite dangerous because it's a biological product. So getting an expired vaccine will make you sick. So when it's time for you to get COVID-19 vaccine, make sure that you're checking the expiry date of the label of the product. And then there's counterfeit product. So okay, so you're all excited. It's time to get a vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine so that you can go out, go to movies, go to restaurants. But what if you got a fake product? So that's a big worry actually because there will be such a shortage of vaccines. How would you control fake products in the market, so there might be hospitals, I wouldn't say hospitals, but I mean some dodgy places where they say, hey, we got the vaccines, but they might be just water or maybe even found something harmful. So even water injected is not a good idea. So how do you ensure that these are not happening? So these are some of the big challenges even before COVID-19, right? So even before COVID-19 with like for polio vaccine, MMR vaccine, these were challenges. But with COVID-19, we are like, this is crazy. This is where things get extremely crazy, right? Because earlier vaccines were designed for children and it took 10 years for us to vaccinate all the children in India to eradicate polio vaccine. So just imagine that 10 years of programs to give everyone vaccines for polio. Now we have 7 billion people on earth, I think little more than that, but they all need vaccines. So you can imagine how many vaccines you would need. First of all, you would probably guess it has 7 billion, but most vaccines would need two shots. So one shot is not enough. So you have to take a shot when I say shot, not a bullet shot, but a vaccine shot. You take one shot and then you probably have to go back after either the 14 day period or one month period to get a booster shot. So together they basically work. So when Pfizer says or some other company says efficacy, it depends on whether it's a one shot or two shots of vaccine. So this number 7 billion in your mind suddenly doubles, right? 14 billion if it's two vaccines. Now, so we know that there's 30% of the vaccines go to spoil, get spoiled in the supply chain. So that is a pretty high number, but that is the reality. So if 30% of the vaccines are getting spoiled, we would probably need somewhere around 19 billion doses of vaccine that needs to be distributed. So to cover the losses as well. So quickly the numbers add up and you're looking at a very expensive distribution challenge and 19 billion. I mean, can you imagine a product which was distributed in such high volumes ever? I mean, so far in the human race, we have never done it. So we don't. So there's going to be a lot of challenges here. There has never been a product which has been distributed in such a large scale. Not food, not clothing, not even the basic ones. They're all decentralized. You can get anywhere, anywhere, any format can produce. But these are vaccines which have to be procured by highly specialized manufacturing units and have to be. So you can't just get a vaccine, order it on Amazon and get it and give it to you yourself, right? So you need someone, a healthcare worker, delivering that vaccine to you. Now, we probably don't have enough nurses to give these vaccines to everyone. So that's another challenge. We don't, we will probably, we probably don't have enough syringes for like, imagine 7 billion people. So two shots, you need 14 billion syringes, disposable syringes. I don't think we have that much volume anywhere in the world right now. So there's not just vaccines. There's a lot of challenges in the world around the vaccine distribution. So if you're just thinking that, hey, what the vaccine is out, we're going to get them next month or early next year. So that's very far from reality. And there's also a lot of challenges around temperature as well because our regular cold chain warehouses and transportation operate in two to eight degrees centigrade. So that is the cold chain logistics that we have. But the sum of the new vaccines which have been in the news should be stored at a very low temperature, minus 20, minus 70. So India will not get these vaccines because we don't have the infrastructure to maintain something at minus 20 or minus 70 degrees centigrade. So again, big problem. Coming, coming back to tech, right? So where you all, all your innovative minds can see this challenge is that, okay, like, so there's so many challenges. If you have enough data around giving you information about what's happening with the vaccine, where they are, how many people are in a society, how many have received vaccines, when should you ship the new set of vaccines. So you can already imagine in your mind the advantages that you get from data, right? So this, so the more data that you have, the better job that you can do at immunizing all these people. So, so the challenges here is, so I mean, this has this multiple systems today. So there's some manufacturers use some sort of system, then there's a different system at a manufacturing level, at a distributor level, different systems. Last mile, there's a different system. So you have this bunch of different system which don't talk to each other. So even if you have EPR collecting data, you're not sharing that data with anyone else. So, so automatically, I can, I can imagine some of you already imagining the use case here for blockchain, right? So blockchain kind of creates this middleware layer where it combines information from various of these systems to create a more distributed decentralized system. So where you have you're solving some of these challenges. So and the manufacturers, so there's three stakeholders in the vaccine supply chain, manufacturers, distributors, and the program teams. So they all have problems for manufacturers. As soon as the product leaves their plant, they have no eyes on where the product is, what condition it is in, when should I get a recall, when should I, where are the products getting distributed? So they have absolutely no information. Distributors, for them, ensuring the product is in good quality is very important. Now, they need real-time data to do that. So that's where the IoTPs and even the real-time data records on blockchain will come into picture. So, and they have a very complex network. So if they work with, it's not just one distributor, there's a bunch of different distributors where the product changes hands. So that's the problem. And in the last mine, the program teams where the, where it's getting delivered to a person. So these guys don't have, so I'm saying child here because that's what these vaccines are used for other than COVID-19. But so these, these people need data to make sure that the vaccine is safe, right? So someone asked the question about, hey, how do you ensure that the vaccine is safe if there is a regulator in place? Or if is someone going to check whether the vaccine is safe? So it's at this time, so they do checks at every time. But at this point, they will do a final check of whether the vaccine is safe or not, whether it expired, whether it's stored in good temperature. And if they don't have the data to examine that, so they wouldn't be able to make a good decision whether the product is good or bad. So, so yeah, as I said, that's where we developed this solution called vaccine ledger. So it took a long time to be really honest to develop this product. It took us more than a couple of years working with various program teams, which still are in the process of making a lot of iterations, adding a lot of new modules. But this year, because so we are in three countries right now, but we're expecting to increase to 21, 25 countries next year. So 25 countries will be running our product to track the vaccines and we basically tracking right from the manufacturer all the way to the distributor. So you can see this where our product is used. We have a both web app and a mobile app, which work with each other, capture the entire supply chain all the way from the manufacturers to UNICEF and UNICEF from country office to regional office. And that's captures data at every point in the supply chain, making sure that the product is both good quality and safe. I can spend more time here. But this is, this is what we're doing. We are also, we also collect data at different points in the supply chain, as you can see it. Yeah, this is a better picture. So this basically from the manufacturer, it goes to like an airport and then from there it goes to another airport, then the warehouse. And this process keeps repeating right from that country warehouse, it goes to a regional warehouse from regional warehouse to hospital and hospital to a patient. So we capture data at every point in the supply chain. We use something called digital IDs for vaccines. These are like how you define asset in the hyper ledger, right? So we do, we on our platform, we basically each, each vaccine gets is defined as an asset has its own unique ID. And so that way you can track the product into it. So I think just about an hour, I think, so I would like to wrap up here by saying that we need some of your bright minds here in the group. So we are growing very quickly this year, especially because of COVID-19. So if I was talking about vaccines, maybe last year, so only if you have a child or if some of your relatives have child, you would probably have cared about vaccines because vaccines is not a, not a common product, household name, right? But because of COVID-19, it has become a household name. Everyone is waiting for vaccines, rightly so. So that kind of kicked us, I mean, accelerated our growth quite rapidly. So we are growing our team as well right now. So we are hiring one, two, three, four, five, six, six people. Yes. So we're hiring six people right now. Some of you are interested to join us. So we would be very happy to get you on board. Even if you want to join part-time and very talented one, but only can come in part-time, we would be happy to get you on board. So do reach out to me if there is interest. We need, we need good talent to basically help us grow this year, especially now we are in the right place at the right time. So I think right people can help us make this very big startup. Hopefully Unicorn from Hyderabad is still rooting for Hyderabad. And so, so yeah. Thanks so much guys. It's been wonderful presenting this. I would now take any questions at the stop here. If you want to steer this direction in a particular direction, I would be happy to do so. Yeah. Thank you so much, Sir. I think some people have already asked questions if you can actually go through them because some of them are technical questions. Okay. So, so I will start with Abhinav Gupta. The first question was about regulatory body and listed upon delivery. So I think kind of answered. So each country has its own regulatory body Abhinav. So, so they kind of regulate the manufacturing process and distribution process. One thing which is not regulated is the API manufacturing. So the thing that happens in China mostly today. So that doesn't come under regulations today. So, so that's unregulated. Why would they pay more unless those vaccines are ensured for superior quality somehow? Yeah, it's basically a demand. So Abhinav's question is, I don't know if others can see questions. What I'll also do is probably I'll try to unmute Abhinav so that he can ask specifically what he would want to know. Can we do that? I think, should I, I mean, should are you okay with that? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay, let me just unmute Abhinav. Hey, hi Abhinav. Hey, hi Abhinav. Am I audible? Yeah, yeah, you are audible now. Yeah. I was asking about, you told me like some rich countries, they procure their vaccines through manufacturing in Europe. But so why are they willing to pay more unless those vaccines are ensured of superior quality somehow? Yeah, so there's a lot of things, Abhinav. It's basically, it accounts to a lot of different costs and also the way, the volumes. So let me give a very simple answer. It's usually not that simple, but it at least gives you a good picture, right? So compare India with UK. So India has 1.3 billion people, right? UK has probably, I don't know, 40 million or some something of that sort, right? So you have this high volume. So and then on the other hand, you have this low volume, right? Now, the amount of money you make even at a lower price in India is probably going to be the same as the amount of money that you make in UK selling at a higher price. So I'm just giving, I mean, I'm simplifying this by a lot. There's a lot of other factors, but this is like the way it works. And then the ability to pay as also different for, let's say in Africa, if you price it at a very high price, no one would buy it, right? But you would still need to distribute these vaccines to the country. So there's different factors going into this. So that's why there is a difference in pricing. Okay, so the manufacturer set the price for different countries? Yeah, manufacturer set the price for different countries in a different... I have one more question. The manufacturers are also different. So the same manufacturer who sells to lower income countries is not usually the same manufacturer who sells to high income countries. So the manufacturer also is different. Have you kept the architecture of the vaccine ledger open source? Is there a wide gap? Yeah, so we are an open source project, MIT license. It's on GitLab. So I will share, so you'll find it under our company name. So that will have all the documentation. So would that also cover the participating nodes in the blockchain infrastructure? Yes, it does, yes. If there is any information that you need further, you can reach out to us and contact us at static.com. Hey, hi Seth. So I'm near to all the participants. So I would request whoever has questions to introduce themselves and then ask your questions. Hello. Yeah, hi Kiran. So I just want to one question. I'm audible, right? Yeah, hi Manoj, you're audible. Would you like to introduce yourself first before you ask a question? Sure. Yeah, I'm Manoj and I'm working as a blockchain lead marketer in one of the startups in Hyderabad. So I have a question like, Seth, this tracking and everything which you have given for the vaccine ledger, which your company is working on, is still the vaccine coming and a patient or the individual being vaccinated? Am I right? Yes. So is there any use case being built up like after getting vaccinated? How do I know a person got vaccinated? Yeah, we are. So we have another app which was designed mostly for children. So which would basically track the vaccine status of a child. So there is the other, we're working with a couple of governments on similar applications for COVID-19. Okay. So I'll just put a background like right now in COVID-19 case in our society. Some people say that they have, they got tested and they got negative in COVID. It might be due to mutual understanding, we might accept them, but some random person coming in, we can't accept his COVID-19 without seeing a proof. So for that, that is the base of my question I am just putting. Yeah. So there's, let me give some more information on that, right? So what happens after vaccination? So let's say government runs this vaccine program. So what happens after that? So most likely everyone is going to get an app on the mobile phone, which would track the status of the person's vaccination, whether he has received, he or she has received vaccine or not. So that is going to be how this will be rolled out. And so that will be used for tracking whether this person has received vaccination or not. I end up like Arundhya Sethu right now. Arundhya Sethu doesn't say, does it say, like, does it track your, whether you had COVID or not? I don't know. I don't, I, whenever I try to log in, it asks me for an ODP and says, you are safe. That's the only thing. Someone records it on your behalf on Arundhya Sethu. Someone from the government reported. Someone does it, right? So I think it's going to be the same with vaccination as well, Manoj. So it's going to be, someone will record at the time of you receiving your vaccine, that hey, you received a vaccine and that will be your record of vaccination. Okay. Okay, sir. Thank you for it. Hi Sethu here. Hello. Yeah, hello. Hi Seth, Kiran here. Kiran Pocharaju. Yeah, hey Kiran, hey Kiran. Yeah, I would like to like, yeah, I myself, I'm an ICB consultant working for Tech Mahindra. Like did my blockchain from NPTEL also, I had a certification on that. Just want to understand, like you, we discussed about the post vaccination, right? Do we have any tracking of like how it is working and how many high stacking the vaccine and what are the like effects of the vaccine for after a couple of years, I mean to say, six years or so? Like is that tracking is there? Like, or we need to design on that. Thank you. So yeah, we are big partners with Tech Mahindra. So we've been working with Rajesh to do the rest of the team. Okay. So going back to your question, right, there's two answers. One, from a government of India perspective, what they're going to do is still to be seen. So I can't talk from that perspective. What I can talk from as a solution provider and a technology provider perspective. So there is, yes, definitely need, because these vaccines are getting manufactured so quickly, this usually takes a long time to get a vaccine out into the market, but this is at an accelerated speed. So there might be side effects, it might work for people, it might not work for people. One vaccine might work better than other vaccines. So you might have to find who got the bad vaccine and you have to probably go back to them and give a good vaccine to them. So there's a lot of news cases there, where there is a need to record which vaccine went to which person at what time. So if you capture that detail, so there is basically a lot of solutions that you can bring for these different news cases. Yeah, that's fine up till now it is fine. But what I'm saying is you're saying there is an app, like we have an app for this, who got the vaccination and is there a feasibility of like the person who has taken the vaccine, like if he feels discomfort or so, any of the person can record their discomfortness in that app? Yeah. Are you asking about our app? No, I think let me summarize the questions. What he's asking is, so let's say you are consuming a vaccine, right? So is there any way or are you offering any service to give some feedback about the vaccine or try your own progress? You are able to, are you feeling any leftist? Yeah, as a technology, as a startup, I would be very excited to offer something in that phase. But I would also be cautious because of regulations. So as soon as you are hitting patient information, so if a patient is sharing, hey, I have this problem, that problem, I took this vaccine. So that is the patient data. So that becomes a medical history of the product and it comes under very strict regulations. Yeah, that is anyhow, we have to follow HIPAA rules, I guess, right? Yeah, yeah. So that's why we have not developed any of those features, unless a government comes and says, hey, we will support you on the regulatory side, we have not more need for that. So I will focus on the supply chain. Yeah, sorry, not just about HIPAA, I think it is also about individual countries jurisdiction as well. So the way you store the patient data also matters, what kind of data storing matters and how you're sharing it with your partner's matters. So once you are very clear with these three steps, only then you will be able to start a product like this. And that is going to create a very high entry barrier to enter. And it's very expensive as well. So these regulations, so the time you get licenses and proper certifications to handle patient information. So you would need a lot of funding from a startup perspective. So if you are a startup, you would be raising at least a million to million dollars to develop this application. So it's not going to be that easy. Yeah, but not that easy, but that is also one point need to be taken care, it's at most taken care. Like if you buy a product for a laptop, example laptop, if it is fails or got an issue with the laptop. And if there is no service center, then it's of no use taking that laptop. Absolutely, you're right. I agree with your requirements. So that should be there. But it's mostly going to come through the government, not a private sector. Also, I think what Kiran is saying is already taken care by the drug manufacturer. So when you're actually conducting these clinical trials, you are supposed to monitor patients 24 by seven, record their symptoms, and then share a study through the FDA or any other medical regulator, and they will do an independent audit through a third party to ensure that your findings are in sync with the actual real world scenario. And only after that, they will give you an approval to actually go ahead and continue the usage of vaccines. This process is probably not followed only when emergency, when the company's authorized for emergency usage, which is what is happening with the COVID vaccines right now. Hi, this is Abhinav Abhinav. Hello, sir. I'm out of here. Yeah, yeah, you are. Yes. Yeah. So can you tell us more about like is blockchain, do you think is it a practical solution to solve this problem? Why not? We can have a third party, which is monitoring all this data and is responsible for its correctness. And also, like is it cost-efficient or is the industry willing to move forward with blockchain-based solutions? I mean, is the timing right or blockchain is still a fancy and a very futuristic solution? Okay, so I missed the first part of the question. I can answer the second one. Can you repeat the first part of the question after this answer? So in terms of industry readiness, the industries which are highly regulated pharmaceutical industry, aerospace industry, so they are ready to deploy blockchain-based solutions. The other industries for them, it's still very far away. So it depends on which industry you are in. Because of regulations, some industries are moving ahead quicker than other industries. Also banking, right? Banking is also regulated, but there are like more direct use cases around financial payments and international so those are regulated industries will be the first one to adopt and then non-regulated industries will have to see. What was the first part of the question? So basically, I was reading a white paper on blockchain. So basically, you're trying to democratize the process of verifying the logistics of vaccine delivery, I guess. So why not you expose your APIs and become a third party who collect data across all the partners in the supply chain and you become the authority to make sure that I mean, instead of democratizing it using the blockchain nodes, you become some third party which will process all this data and will ensure the correctness. Yeah, there's different models. Thanks for that question. So there's different models that and different directions we could take. We have not ruled out anything as of now. As I said, there's no other player in the vaccine space like it was actually working with UNICEF and Gavi like we are doing right now. So this space is like, there are very few players involved and so it's very hard to have this community effect where you just create an API layer and leave it for someone to develop it. So that's why we had to go ahead and develop a lot of applications ourselves. But hopefully, yeah, I mean, in the future there will be more especially now because of Hello. Yeah. Okay, so we lost in between for a few moments. Now we can hear you. Okay. Okay. Probably my internet. So what I was saying is, I mean, we don't have we don't have a fixed model in terms of how we are going. So since there are very few players in the vaccine supply chain space, so we had to develop our own applications and mature this market. So if there are no more, more companies entering this space, then we, I mean, that model can be successful where we just expose APIs and these companies start developing applications on top. Okay. Also, is there some benefit in terms of regulation? Like if we integrate the option in the supply chain for these companies, can it also work as some proof of concept for them to reduce their regulatory work? Absolutely. So regulation basically relies on auditing. So they basically need transparency in the supply chain. And they need auditable records of all the transactions that are happening. So that's why blockchain is a good fit for them because it provides both immutable records of these transactions. And it also, that kind of enables transparency in the whole supply chain. So for them, for regulators, it's a good system because now they, I mean, it can help them in a, it can make their life easy or easier. So like, wouldn't you have to be like government approved to Government never approves a solution. So it never says, okay, this is our yeah. So it can recommend something. So when you say government, I'm assuming you're saying regulator. So regulator never says, okay, use this vendor for everything. So they might suggest that a blockchain technology is good technology, which USFDA does. So USFDA also granted pilots last year for the technology. So to that extent, they can do, but they can't go and say, yeah, I'm going to be against their fundamental principle. So they can't recommend a solution or have a contract with one particular vendor. And so their hands are tied in that sense. Got it. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, Kiran, you raised your hand. Am I audible? Yeah, you're audible. Okay. Like, in a conversation, I understand that we have competitors in the market or like, no, who designed in the broader life, life sciences market. So to take blockchain for supply chain or blockchain for pharmaceutical supply chain, there are plenty of players. One good reference is MediLager project in the US, which is quite popular, very mature. It has done pilots with a bunch of different pharmaceutical companies. But still, I mean, most of them are in the pilot stage. So one of the most difficult things with blockchain use cases is very hard to implement, especially in large industry setup, right? So how do you bring these multi-billion dollar companies together to implement your solution? So which is a very difficult problem. So there are still in, I think, pilot stages. I don't see large full-scale deployments anywhere. Okay, like one more question, like, how, like, how is, how it is designed in our use case, like SAP is used in this, like, in this design that we have discussed. Mostly API integrations with SAP and other supply chain solutions. So that's how we capture data and record them at different points. So it feeds into our transactional data. So each transactional data, so we also capture data from SAP or the IoT sensor and feed that into that particular transaction. So it kind of makes that whole transaction much more richer from that perspective. Yeah, data is coming from cloud or from SAP cloud or? SAP cloud, yeah, usually cloud, yeah. That means you mean SAP HANA cloud or like non SAP HANA cloud? Mostly HANA integrations right now, but we're also looking at other integrations. AWS? Yeah, so we are, right now, supported on both AWS and Azure. For different integrations, we have different, so we create plugins. So where our plugin sits on the platform, can pull data from the third party and feed it into the system or vice versa, from our transactional data can go into SAP as well. Okay, and it is IoT or IoT is used in this technology, like, in this case, because when? So the primary use case of IoT, let me put this, let me give some perspective on that if anyone is interested. No, no, my question is, like, I just want to know whether it is IoT or IoT A, IOTA? Oh, IOTA, no, no, no, we're not using IOTA, yeah. And there was, so we looked at it in early stages when back in 2017. So that's when IOTA became very famous. So we also met the co-founder in Germany. So, but we didn't, I mean, so it was a very good idea, but I mean, we didn't, I don't know, it went into that direction. Can we contact through mail or any contact number? I'm on the group, hyper-legion group. So I think Kash, the main side of it. So I will be there. What's your group? Hyper-legion, Hyderabad, what's up? Okay, in our, okay, in this group, okay, fine. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I think if anyone else has questions, let me just check. Guys, there's time for one last question. You mentioned something about IoT, I mean, you can share it with us. Oh, okay, IoT, guys, as I said, right, sensors are key in supply chain or any other industry. So now how you do use that data is becoming quite interesting. So it's probably would need a separate session on that, but how I would summarize that is, there's a lot of scope for innovation in that space. So if some of you are going to work on that, please do one of the things that you have to ensure is the low cost model for supply chains. One thing to keep in mind is supply chains are very low cost industries. So the markets in the supply chain industry are extremely low. So if you build a very expensive solution, no one would buy it. So that's the address that I have for IoT. So there are solutions that exist, IoT solutions, but they're very expensive right now. Yeah, you said, you said you'll show some IoT related stuff. No, I don't have any IoT related stuff to share. Yeah, you want to show something, I stopped you in between. Oh, no, no, I was going to share. I mean, like, yeah, but I think it would need like a separate session to discuss IoT, what exactly is the use cases and stuff. So it's a very broad area. Okay. Yeah. Okay, cool. As a closing note, I have one question said. Yeah. So, you know, the opportunity for this kind of a solution is definitely massive and it is also very relevant to the current point of time. Right. But what would be the biggest risk for your startup right now? Like, as in what I mean is that, you know, what's stopping a pharmaceutical company like Novartis to, you know, enter into this space and build their own solution. Yeah, the biggest risk is already, I mean, I mean, being with governments. So even if Novartis has a private company, they might be willing, but eventually this has to be deployed by a government. So the risk is basically, so I mean, working with governments has always been a big risk. So let it put me that way. So startups, you don't see a lot of startups working with governments because it's very difficult as a customer. So some governments are innovative but not all governments are innovative. So that is the biggest risk in this whole business. Yeah, Sid, I do have a question before the starting of the session, when I was promoting this, I got a question from one of the investors. I think you already know, he's also from T-HUB, Vikrant Varshne, co-founder and managing partner, succeed venture. So he texted me on Facebook, he asked like this, I would like to know what this company or this platform is doing from the lens of an investor. So you already talked about investors, so he already have texted me like, he wanted to see this platform, he wanted to understand this platform from a lens of an investor. That's what he exactly texted me. So what should I reply? Okay. Yeah, I can probably set up. Also from, I think you must be knowing Vikrant, sir is a advisor to T-HUB. Okay, yeah, I think I heard the name somewhere and probably have seen him in T-HUB, but I don't think I personally met him before. So yeah, we'll be happy to meet him. Yeah, so what is your point when it comes to some investor, what do you showcase? So basically investors are interested in multiplying their investments. So the potential of making how this startup would scale is what would be interested to an investor. So if you can show a path, a clear path of how you can make 20X, 30X, or make a $100 billion company in the next five years. So that would be interesting for an investor. So that is where we are right now. I think we're with COVID-19. I think we are expecting to track nearly 5 to 7 billion doses of vaccine on our platform next year. So yeah, I think we'll be excited to meet any investor. We already recently raised a fund and we'll be raising more investments next year. Okay, awesome. That is great news. And I also belong from a technical background. So yeah, somebody Srinivas have asked this question and many people were asking about the infrastructure of blockchain. And Srinivas have asked like what is the tech stack? So being a developer and most of us are like not taking background interested in this thing. Yeah, sure. I mean, as I said, our project is a completely open source. You can find all the details. I mean, we use and most of our coding is done in Node.js. We use a reactive framework kind of like source. So I mean, it's a very simple stack, microservices based architecture. So you can get more details on our hit language. Yeah, okay. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone. This is this was fun. Thanks for inviting me and say the last question. Yeah. Do we have meetups? Do we have one? Meetups? Anywhere? From a startup perspective? Like we used to have a meetups for IOTA. Oh, okay. No, no, no, no. I mean, we're not that big. So I had a multi-million dollar and a million dollar and they had an ICO. So all the startups. No, no. What I'm going to say is like along with the Dermain and our group, we have, we used to discuss on IOTA stuff and we meet at one point and discuss on the things that kind of meet us. No, no, we right now we don't have basically resources to do any of the external marketing stuff. But we would want to do that in some time in the future. So we are, as you can see on the screen, right? So we need urgent we are accidentally recruiting people. So yeah, I think, I think what Kiran mean is like, I think you are talking about the physical meetup, which decent. So yeah, this also is a parallely where we are doing one more. This is a separate group we have called Hyperlegia Khadrabad. We also used to meet just like decent renting. So due to COVID, I think we are just doing it virtually. So okay, I get it now. So I thought you wanted us to organize meetups as a company. Sorry about that. Yeah. Okay. All right. Hey, thanks guys. I'm heading out, but it was fun. And thanks everyone for your time and have a good weekend. Thanks a lot for joining us and taking us through your journey. This is very informative and very insightful for us. Maybe we can soon follow up with the second session where you take us through some of the technical details and share your insights on how you put in some sort of design thinking to come up with this framework. And maybe you can even organize a workshop in the future if that works for you. Yeah, let's do that. Let's plan for that. Okay. Okay, cool. Thank you so much everyone. Thanks. Bye. Yeah, please share the webinar link. Recorded link. Yeah. Recorded link will be up level on our YouTube channel soon. Maybe into one or two days. If you guys want to join the meetup group or the WhatsApp group, please drop your phone number in the chat. We will add you to the WhatsApp channel so that you'll be connected to the other members of the community. Okay, fine. You mean chat for the session? Yes, yes. I'm making a note of the numbers just a second. Yeah, please join our meetup.com link I have already shared. Our all meetups will be listed there. Okay, Sid. It's showing we could not process at this time. Which one? The meetup group. Join this group we're showing we could not process at this time. Which link are you referring to? The link that we shared now. We could not process your request at this time. Please try later. The meetup link. Yeah, meetup.com slash hyper ledger. Yes, yes, yes. That's weird. Can you check once? Okay. I'll open it my incognito. There is a join this group button. Maybe meetup.com is down. Yeah, so this is an actually official hyper ledger group. Yeah, it's working fine. It is asking for sign up, sign up with Facebook or Google. When I click on this join this group, it is showing that message. Are you logged in? Logged in through? Are you logged in and meetup? Yeah, I had like through just let me log in and try. Yeah, you have to log in, you have to be logged in and meetup. Okay, I'll check and I'll check if anything is there. Yeah, you can directly message us on meetup as well. Yeah, okay. Kathika, did you get a chance to take the numbers? Yeah, I am noting down the numbers. I'll add all of you today. Anyway, I think this chat will be also saved locally to our system. Once the call is done. Oh, that's why I'm not sure about the chat. Everything else gets I'm just noting down. It's okay. Okay, cool. Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, Kathika, once you note, should I end this session? No, I'll end it. You can just carry on. You can take rest. Yeah, now I'm able to log in. Yeah, I joined in the group, meetup group. Thank you, Sid. Thanks for the session. Nice, informative. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, thank you. I'm just closing this. Thanks.