The GenomesDAO Journey
Part 1: How it all started.
Our journey started back in 2018 when five friends (Mark, Al, Chris, Simon and Aldo) got together to put their entrepreneurial ideas into practice.
Each had a specific skill set that they could bring to the table and there were plenty of creative ideas cooking to get started. As a geneticist Mark had a good understanding of DNA data and its rapidly increasing value for the research and pharmaceutical industry. Being an engineer Chris had a very precise operational sense that could be applied to all the logistics that our newfound company would bring along. Simon knew best how to gain start-up support from the UK government (essential in the early days of a company’s lifetime) while Al was an expert in Marketing. Aldo had experience in building ventures, as he, like Mark had previously founded a technology company.
The five of us had been walking around for a long time with the idea to vault genomic data and had discussed the concept in many (pub-) conversations. Previous chats had stranded not because there was a lack of enthusiasm but because there was a huge technical gap that was hard to overcome.
Other endeavours to digitally protect your genome had only been undertaken in big fortress institutions such as MIT who had entire dedicated encryption departments and computing power to undertake such a massive exercise. But with technology and science evolving at such a rapid pace, the growth of blockchain and the big health data grab that D2C genetic companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com were on — it was clear that the time was now.
So in July 2018 the founding team started its journey creating a blueprint, carefully recruiting developers and starting conversation with Angel Investors to see if the concept could fly.
That there was a lift-off was confirmed when an initial Angel Investor raise on the equity platform CrowdCube resulted in 300% overfunding. More success followed when the Genomes Team got accepted into Tachyon, the startup accelerator program of Consensys in February 2019, giving us first hand insights and connections to the biggest blockchain company in the world.
Fun fact: the company Ether Cards who we are excited to partner with on several projects in the near future was part of this cohort as well. The first two years of our existence we mainly focussed on the proper development of our technology to ensure we could make the most robust tech stack available to anyone keen to vault their genome. Another triumph followed when the huge hardware company AMD announced it wanted to officially collaborate with Genomes for the development of these vaults with their new cutting edge AMD SEV-ES vault technology.
In September 2020 we set our first steps into the D2Cmarket introducing our product to an alpha set of users, gaining loads of feedback and support. The communication with them led us to dive deeper into what the consumer wants, looking at their desire to receive a good sense of security, loads of information and passive income at the same time.
This ability to gather feedback and discover the good ideas of a wider crowd coincided with the growth of decentralised autonomous organisations in the blockchain and crypto world. This led us to setting up a GenomesDAO in the middle of 2021.
