„Venture Capital“ became a widely known term and is still gaining a media growth. Startup enthusiasm is also evolving, for example in east European countries, hence is the need for venture capitalists rising. Starta is aiming for investments and support of east European startups with an eye on exits to the US market.
What is the goal of Starta?
The idea of Starta with their „Accelerator 16/17“ consists of an early stage Investment model focused on startups in eastern Europe. Many startups are still facing problems while looking for venture capital if they don’t have access to an existing network of investors. Starta is awarding them small sums of investments, but furthermore supports them to build the company during their Accelerator program.
The overall goal is to push the Startups and afterwards connect them to a bigger network of venture capitalists from the US that are looking for investment opportunities in later phases than Starta. Therefore Starta’s main goal is to „bridge“ the US capital market to the east European startup market.
How is the Starta ICO working?
Starta wants to collect money during an ICO in partnership with another company to raise their capital stock that is invested in the startups of the accelerator. Therefore Starta is working with Singapore based „Cross Coin“ for the technical challenges of the project. Cross Coin, which is distributing a token with the same name, should hold 33 percent of the Starta Accelerator 16/17 LLC. The revenues Cross Coin is earning with their share of Starta Accelerator 16/17 LLC shall be distributed for the token holders of Cross Coin.
I designed a simple graphics for this procedure to make it clearer:
Up to 1.5 Million USD will be invested directly in the 16/17 Program. If investments exceed this cap, the rest will be invested into future programs of Starta.
What is the relation between Starta and Blockchain technologies?
One might ask what Starta really has to do with a Blockchain. The project is rather focusing on an investor’s than on a technical perspective. There is no real innovation itself based on DLT, Cross Coin is just making use of the new way of tokenization for sharing revenues. We will refer back to this later.
The goal of Starta seems quite interesting, though we are dealing with a less technical investment opportunity, compared to e.g. Mysterium, Humaniq, WeTrust, Golem etc. In my opinion, it is even more important in this project to take a look on the record track of the team and to verify the information they are providing.
First of all I cross-checked some information they provided with search engines, social networks and companies. Following the publicly available information, the data seems to be correct (no stolen images etc.), which eliminates the doubt of Starta being a scam. Additionally, let’s pick Roy Weissman for further investigation in his record track. He is claiming to have a lot of business experience and inherited some high-level Sales positions.
Roy Weissman
Role at Starta: Sales and Business Development Advisor
Weissman is the Vice President Business Development at Octopus, an american media company. The company’s website is immediately opening up with Weissman’s head. Hence, he seems to inherit a quite active role in the project. Octopus is claiming to have worked with Amazon as a partner in the past.
He is also a mentor at „Protokol App“, a startup funded by Starta with approximately USD 130.000 in the beginning of 2017. Though the startup is quite young, their website is not available, only welcoming you with the note that the domain is expired.
Furthermore, Weissman is the Vice President of Sales at SendPulse, a professional E-Mail marketing company that is using Artificial Intelligence in their product. Doing some research on SendPulse shows a widely known state of the startup. Though Weissman is inheriting a Sales Position, this could prove that he is familiar with leadership of young, tech-savvy startups.
Summary
In fact, Starta is not really an innovation, but rather an existing model applied on a different market and transformed to a tokenized revenue sharing model, it will not be a zero to one startup. The project team seems to be experienced enough to successfully lead the project.
In conclusion, I am convinced of Starta Accelerator being an already proven concept (VC) with the right team. Therefore, as stated before, it is limited in their revenues and scalability – but the team seems to be experienced enough.
This document is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as “investment advice” or as a “recommendation” regarding a course of action, including without limitation as those terms are used in any applicable law or regulation. No advisory at all.