This story is much too long to write in a single sitting. It'll be WIP for the foreseeable future as I add more stories and context.

Educhain was first conceptualized in April 2016 in Vienna, Austria.

Bored of my finance degree and after a short stint learning German, I had recently take indefinite leave from university in favor of moving to a German-speaking country to master the language.

In a European world where two masters degrees seemed to be a virtual requirement for internships, I applied to over 300 companies with just 5 semesters of a Bachelors in hand and was rejected by all of them.

All it took was one response, three interviews, and I was moving to Vienna to work for the fintech vertical Match-Maker Ventures (MMV), an innovation consultancy facilitating partnerships and M&A between European corporates and high-growth startups.

2015 and 2016 were great years for European fintech. Neobanking, lending, and payments verticals were all blowing up driven by big successes like N26, Revolut, Funding Circle, Klarna, Transferwise, and many others. Simultaneously, banks were waking up to the real risk of financial disintermediation as startups started chipping away at their core products, offering superior experiences and value.

While working in Vienna, myself along with Marek Termanowski; one of my friends and coworkers from MMV, were captured by the promise of blockchain technology. Having adopted bitcoin in 2010 and running a small brokerage for a number of years, I was frustrated by I missed such an obvious value-add of the technology.

Early ideation with Marek
Early ideation with Marek

For financial institutions, the promise started with the digitization of various back office functions like post-trade clearing and settlement.

Where we found most value was in something simpler - digital data notarization. From healthcare to academic records, we deal with so much data in the digital domain that can easily be manipulated or outright fabricated. Interoperability is virtually non-existent, and we end up relying on taking all that data that sits in a digital form in some database somewhere, and printing it back into an analog form.

Marek and I had both faced this problem with living and working internationally - documents, attestations, notarizations, translations - equating to hundreds of dollars in costs and weeks (if not months) of processing time.

The premise was simple - official digital documents. Educhain plugs into your existing student information system (SIS) and enables the issuance of verifiable, official, digital documents. Working from K-12 to universities and ministries of education, this covered everything from letters, to report cards, transcripts, diplomas, attestations, badges, and more.

Bootstrapping Educhain was probably both the dumbest and smartest thing I’ve done in my life. Marek and I effectively lived at cost for 6 years, reinvesting every dollar of revenues into the business. It was the single biggest struggle in my life with a considerable mental and physical toll.

It involved lots of quintessential startup stories like trying to figure out how to manage cashflow from enterprise customers, living off of credit cards, and how to make payroll next month with $6 in the bank.

I learned that I thrive in uncertainty, in other areas that could otherwise break people - but that it is only sustainable when you put personal care first (which took a long time to really put in practice).

We got into Techstars in the fall of 2019. It was an invaluable experience to help us solidify our business and integrate more comprehensive controls, processes, and KPIs as we scaled. Having done half of our program in-person, we were the first Techstars cohort to go digital. I vividly remember stacking cardboard boxes in my small downtown apartment to raise my laptop high enough to make a half-decent demo day recording.

Rashit (CTO) and me at Techstars clocking out of the office
Rashit (CTO) and me @ Techstars

In 2020 we saw explosive growth during the pandemic as every academic institution shifted to remote-first operations, and digital was escalated as a top priority. It was an incredible (if not overwhelming) period which redefined our business as we struggled to keep up with demand.

While this was happening, acquisition offers started coming in, and one was extremely attractive enough to seriously consider. We signed an LOI and started the due diligence process - they ended up trying to steal our IP and immediately launched a competitor in the market.

After the acquisition drama we returned to hyperscaling the business, with a newfound drive to dominate the market. After fending off new and old competition alike, we solidified our position as the undisputable market leader in MENA for digital credentialing.

Almost a year later Educhain was acquired by Yorkville Partners which took a majority stake in April 2021. The whole team stayed on and I took on a more formalized role as VP of Product.

Since then, it's grown considerably and is now branching out into adjacent use cases (healthcare - birth/death certificates) and finance (mortgage documents).

I am still engaged in a limited capacity for strategic and product advisory, business development, and supporting special projects. You can reach me at mark@educhain.io.