How Qila.io helping enterprises leverage blockchain for secure data management

Blockchain technology has many use cases that solves several real life problems. From sectors like education to healthcare to financial services, blockchain-based offerings are witnessing rising adoption. However, the pace of adoption can be faster if it is provided as a simple offering at an affordable cost. Qila.io is a startup, which provides blockchain as a service to customers. In a conversation with the Bizz Buzz, company’s co-founder, Sid Ugrankar said that it has developed solutions for several sectors including healthcare, retail, financial services and education among others. It has been in talks with several enterprises for adoption of its offerings. He said that NFTs (non-fungible tokens) can better protect the privacy and security of any critical data than the centralised system. The company is targeting enterprises in the US, Middle East and India among others. He also said that the company is in talks with several strategic investors to raise capital for funding its business growth

Can you provide a brief overview about the operations of Qila.io? How are you leveraging blockchain to help enterprises solve their business problems?

We started operations in 2020. Since 2020, we started building India’s first blockchain cloud platform. ‘Qila’ means fortress and our company name is synonymous with providing security. So, Qila is a service provider that allows enterprises and public service agencies to build, run, manage and scale their own dedicated blockchain networks. So, if a company decides to provide a NFT (non-fungible token) to its customers, then it has to do it on a public cloud platform. However, what we do is that we provide our own cloud platform. So, Qila is India’s first blockchain cloud platform. Our datacentre is in India. We are expanding in Middle East. As blockchain is data-based service, we have to follow the data localisation rules of that particular geography. In a few months, we are planning to set up such centre in Chicago in the US.

There was a big hype around Web 3 startups post pandemic. But, ongoing funding winter seems to have dampened the sentiment around Web 3. What is your opinion about this matter?

There is definitely cyclicality associated with any technology domain. What happened that Web 3 was very closely associated with cryptocurrency. When cryptocurrency like bitcoin did well, the entire Web 3 ecosystem did well. When bitcoin didn’t do well, it impacted the performance of the Web 3 ecosystem. Because of the volatility of cryptocurrency, it impacted the Web 3 ecosystem. However, after the downturn, now the various blockchain solutions are getting leveraged to provide business solutions to enterprises. For instance, in case of fractional ownership in real estate market, blockchain solutions are real game-changers as non-fungible tokens are allocated to owners, specifying the parts of that asset. Therefore, blockchain can be used and is now being used in many sectors.

Qila provides blockchain-as-a-service to its customers. Are you sector agnostic or do you focus on any specific sector?

We are sector agnostic. However, through our experience, we are focussed on healthcare sector in India. All the healthcare companies, especially diagnostics, huge amount of data with respect to patients are stored. We have seen instances of wrong reports getting generated and even cases of fraud in test reports during the Covid period. So, through our blockchain solutions, we are trying to solve this problem where data can’t be tampered and stored securely. We are in talks with healthcare providers to provide blockchain solutions in which NFTs will be provided to customers through which integrity of the data will be maintained. Another sector, we are focussing on is the agriculture sector. There are use cases where companies are interested in using blockchain solutions to provide pricing of various commodities without any fear of these datasets getting tampered. Similarly, luxury good is another segment where we are trying to solve the problem of counterfeits. We all know that luxury goods have a huge counterfeit market. But through leveraging blockchain, such counterfeiting can be restricted. Companies can provide NFTs to customers once they purchase their goods.

Similarly, we are in talks with educational institutions to provide secured and non-tampered storage of certificates and other documents through blockchain solution. Though the government has the massive plan of doing it through digilocker, but centralised data management is failing. This is because when the data gets hacked, it is very expensive to run those systems. As compared to this, in NFTs- the token itself protects the information. So, the owner of that asset can access the data. That’s how the blockchain has been built. In education space, we are targeting the universities in the US. We are in talks with four universities in the US to help tokenise some of their assets. In the Middle East, we are partnering with a company, which is talking to various financial institutions to leverage our infrastructure.

Are these use cases under implementation or are they in the experiment stage?

In the healthcare space, we are in the cusp of announcing a collaboration with a clinical testing laboratory. That is a commercial engagement, we are in POC (proof of concept) with two universities. We are also running around 10 pre-POCs with various organisations.

Are you planning to raise capital for funding your business growth? Can you throw some light into this aspect?

We are planning to raise capital in the coming days. As we are in the pre-revenue stage, fund houses may not be keen on funding. Therefore, we are not approaching fund houses. We are approaching strategic investors, who have successful businesses. They can also be consumers of our products. As we have worked in the telecom space earlier, we are reaching out to some of the investors in this area.

Are you looking at collaborating with IT services firms or specialised technology players for offering your blockchain solutions to their clients?

Yes, we are doing that. We are partnering with a company, which has several financial institutions as clients. So, we are plugging into that company’s offerings to reach out their clients.

What are the key challenges that you may face going ahead in adoption of blockchain as a solution?

We are providing infrastructure as a service, which is very capital intensive. But, we have developed it as a SaaS model, which can be scaled up very fast. Secondly, the adoption level of blockchain solutions remains low. We are trying to give simple solutions so that adoption level will rise. Thirdly, we are focussing on the US and other foreign markets.