Startup Profile: Hashing Systems
This story was originally published on the Techstars blog. View here.
Hashing Systems founder Pablo Peillard recognizes both advantages and disadvantages to being a student entrepreneur – and that’s exactly what makes programs like LaunchPad’s Virtual Mentorshipso valuable to college-aged founders like himself.
“As students, we’re often more accepting and enthusiastic about new technologies,” said Pablo. “That puts us in a great position to make the best use of emerging solutions quickly. However, young entrepreneurs also have to research possibilities much more extensively than more experienced professionals to determine the best course of action.”
Empowering Companies to Benefit from an Emerging Technologies
Hashing Systems was founded by Pablo in the winter of 2018 during Hedera18, a hackathon sponsored by Hedera Hashgraph, a blockchain network recently launched in 2018. Hedera has been recruiting Fortune 500 companies like Google, IBM, Boeing, T-Mobile, and others to join their governance council.
As this network is still in its early days, Pablo saw that there were no standards or tools to streamline Hashgraph application development. This resulted in applications being created from scratch and lacking compatibility with each other. Pablo and his team tackled this problem by creating necessary standards like universal domain names, chrome extensions, and automation tools.
Hashing Systems first released Composer, which has become the most used web extension to access Hedera’s network. Then the team developed Console, a platform that automates deployments like smart contracts for developers on Hedera Hashgraph. Expanding to enterprise solutions, they are now working on services to verify information as it enters their servers using Hedera Hashgraph’s consensus service. This will allow companies to trust their data as it will be virtually tamper-proof.
According to Pablo, “We realized we needed to provide a framework tailored to developing scalable blockchain applications – but enable companies to avoid the need to upload their entire logic onto an immutable smart contract.”
Early Successes
To date, Pablo and Benjamin have raised more than $100,000 for Hashing Systems after completing the Helix Accelerator in Hong Kong. (Helix is the first Hedera-focused accelerator.)
Hashing also reports more than 1,000 users developing on their platform. Pablo has moderated and spoken at multiple panels including Bloconomic in Malaysia, Web Summit 2019 in Lisbon, and TruffleCon in Seattle.
LaunchPad’s Virtual Mentorship Program and University Resources
From Dallas’s Big Idea Competition to CometX, StartupLaunch, and UTDesign Startup Challenge, Pablo began Hashing Systems by taking advantage of many of the resources available to him while at UT Dallas. He’s also given back to the UTD entrepreneur community, growing the university’s Markerspace to hold larger events and host a wider array of activities. He’s now thrilled to be part of Launchpad’s Virtual Mentorship Program, which he sees as the next step in his entrepreneurial journey.
“The mentorship component of Launchpad’s programming has been incredibly valuable for the team,” said Pablo. “Our mentor, Babak Kia, draws experience from advising hundreds of startups which has helped us create a maturity matrix to help corporations scale their blockchain deployments.”
Since joining the LaunchPad Virtual Mentorship Program, Hashing Systems has received several awards and formed valuable relationships. The team was recognized with a 2019 Golden Kitty award from ProductHunt for Best Developer Tool of the year and they have also begun partnerships with smart contract security platform MythX and opensource marketplace Gitcoin to enhance their products and expand the developer community.
With new ideas and offerings currently under development, and the support of programs like LaunchPad’s Virtual Mentorship, the future of Hashing Systems is certainly bright.