As various online services provide broader access to users in fields such as video, content creation, guides and start-up capital, the ends to which users are utilizing those means are sparking innovation. As for the companies that provide those services, like Indiegogo Inc., things are proving to be more than a one-way street.

“The idea of democratizing access to entrepreneurship between our partnership [with IBM]  just really makes me smile,” said Slava Rubin (pictured, left), founder of Indiegogo Inc., referring to the work in which his company is now engaging with IBM Corp.

Rubin and Deon Newman (pictured, right), vice president of marketing, Internet of Things, at IBM, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live-streaming studio, during IBM InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas, NV. (*Disclosure below.)

As Rubin explained, Indiegogo’s partnership with Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions formed a first step as it looked for a partner that would be able to help expand their capabilities across all the tech-connected fields, with management of data and improved hardware performance being some key areas of focus.

From there, the partnership with IBM followed, with its efforts together centering “around everything Internet of Things, cloud, security and being able to provide the blockchain and anything else we need,” Rubin said.

IBM was similarly enthusiastic about the partnership, Newman said. He listed a number of big companies with which IBM had partnered, but noted that “where we didn’t have an offering that was being used extensively was in the startup space. And when we saw what Indiegogo had been doing in the marketplace … it was just a match made in heaven.”

Democratizing platforms

While Indiegogo’s primary purpose is to help people raise funds for projects, Rubin sees it as having the potential for much more, and as being capable of achieving that in the relatively near future.

“I think that capital was just one of those first points, and now [users are] starting to get the money, but lots of other things are hard,” he said.

“When you can actually get artificial intelligence, get cloud capabilities, get security capabilities, put it into a service so you don’t need to figure out all those things on your own, so you can go from a small little idea to actually start scaling pretty rapidly, that’s super-exciting,” Rubin added. “We’re a platform, we started out just with funding, we’re really becoming now a springboard for entrepreneurs, [but] we can’t do it all ourselves, which is why we’re bringing on these great partners.”

As the triangle of Indiegogo, Arrow ECS and IBM moves forward with their mutually supportive developments, both Rubin and Newman anticipated being able to leverage the data and connections made into things that will allow them to stay on the cutting edge.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. (*Disclosure: SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE is a media partner at InterConnect. Neither IBM nor other conference sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE