David Cohen – CEO of Techstars

SwarmCorp, the world’s first distributed incubator that uses an innovative funding-by-cryptocurrency design, just finished its first-ever Decentralized Demo Day and has announced Techstars as yet another first-ever institutional investor using the native Swarm Coin.

Swarm represents an innovative way for projects and startups to gather funding with a democratized, decentralized crowdfunding platform. New ventures produce their own cryptocurrency on the Swarm platform and then use that to provide equity to backers.

The investment by Techstars will likely give SwarmCorp a boost towards getting the ball rolling to kickstart more startups.

“We believe that Swarm’s innovative fundraising model has the possibility to completely transform the venture capital industry,” said David Cohen, CEO of Techstars, “and we want to help make this happen. That’s why we are making the world’s first fund investment via cryptoequity.”

SiliconANGLE first reported on Swarm during the platform’s launch in June 2014 and today represents the first five companies to emerge from the incubator.

The five companies launching from Swarm

The first, Manna, seeks to provide the public with personal-level drones that can be controlled via smartphone.

Next is Swarmops, a project that hopes to become a decentralized platform for swarm activism, providing difficult-to-stop communications, marshalling, and organization for civil liberties resistance to oppressive regimes. The Swarmops system provides a decentralized, democratized bureaucracy platform by driving decentralized authority via management of volunteers, activists, budgets, mass communication, expenses, payroll, invoices, and bookkeeping.

Judobaby has a decentralized gaming platform. Currently, the prominent game released by Judobaby involves dog football—available for the Nintendo Wii and PC platforms.

Coinspace seeks to build a co-working space for cryptocurrency developers, inventors, and business interests in New York City. Interested parties can use Swarm, through Space Coins, to back the space and receive membership and thus access. The planned launch of the workspace is in about six months. View this interview with Sol Lederer of Coinspace [YouTube] for more details.

The final startup product is a little whimsical: DDP, or Decentralized Dance Party. The DDP is a “portable, battery-powered Party System,” that uses a central DJ who carries a transmitter and a swarm of people carrying boom boxes tuned to receive the transmission. Described as a “mobile, synchronized sound system,” the platform seems primitive but brings together many cultural elements encouraged by Swarm and Bitcoin: decentralization, individual performance, and innovative uses of technology.

photo credit: fra-NCIS via photopin cc