Highlights from DeSci Pitch Day!

 

At Boost VC, we are very excited about the prospects of decentralized science (DeSci) and what it potentially unlocks for the scientific community. We’ve been diving deep into this space over the last year and get more excited by the day. Quick plug: Adam Draper, Managing Director at Boost VC, released a podcast series on the outlook of DeSci, and we recently invested in Molecule - an awesome player in this space.  

On Monday, November 14, 2022, we hosted our first DeSci Pitch Day at Boost VC, and couldn’t be more excited about the energy of the DeSci community! We had over 50 great teams apply, of which 10 teams were selected to share their DeSci startups at the pitch day. To assess the pitches on their vision and viability, we had 4 judges, including Jocelynn Pearl (Ultra Rare Bio), Gus Domel (Boost VC), Patrick Joyce (ResearchHub), and Patrick Malone (KdT Ventures). The turnout for the event was great; we are thankful that there are so many great people galvanizing behind this important movement. 

We were delighted to award first place and a $25k investment prize to Data Lake, a startup making data donation as easy as blood donation with Web3 tools. In second place we had a 3-way tie between Crowd Funded Cures, Molecular Reality, and Somareality. And finally Weavechain landed in third.

In case you weren’t able to tune in, the startups who participated are listed below. All of the founders brought great enthusiasm and interesting ideas. 

  • AthenaDAO:  decentralized collective to fund women’s reproductive health research and drug discovery

  • Crowd Funded Cures:  crowdfunding impact markets for open source medicines

  • Data Lake:  creating an international medical data donation system based on Web3 technologies

  • DB DAO:  a database for DeSci data

  • Health X Change:  paying patients crypto for access to their health data

  • inTheory:  a digital marketplace for direct exposure to scientific discovery

  • Molecular Reality:  a console for gamified citizen science

  • Researchain:  an NFT platform for publishing scientific papers

  • Somareality:  developing digital biomarkers for Virtual Reality

  • Weavechain:  enabling GDPR/HIPAA compliant data that can benefit from tokenomic reward models

We look forward to continuing our involvement in the DeSci community and to hosting more of these events. If you or someone you know is building in this space, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at apply@boost.vc or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates about future similar events. It’s a great time to build!

 
Adam DraperAll, All 2