Please describe your proposed solution.

The Problem

Part of the gap we identified in the Cardano ecosystem is the need of projects & companies active on Cardano to raise external funding and we often get requests for support. Part of the gap includes knowledge on how to approach VC and how to prepare an attractive pitch deck.

When starting a company the technology is obviously important but it is not enough. Who is the customer? What problem are you solving? what is to go to market? Business model? They are all essential areas to be able to raise funds and for a successful business to scale.

About Edify Collabs

Edify Collabs is the onchain expression of The Edify Ecosystem (Edify) - an impact, innovation, investment-focused consultancy, coaching practice and partner Ecosystem. Formed to work within the Catalyst community Edify Collabs focuses on the identification, measurement, growth and valuation of both tangible and intangible assets of an organisation, and the alignment of those assets to the impact of the organisation - which is delivered through a bespoke programme of mentoring consultancy and coaching programmes.

Their approach is based upon seeding Exponential Organisational Growth through meeting wicked challenges and leveraging exponential opportunities.

Using their proven set of scalable tools and frameworks, They generally work with innovation focused small and medium commercial businesses and support them to grow them into the 'next band' of scale. Over the last two decades Edify have coached and mentored hundreds of senior leadership team members, from many successful small and medium enterprises, and Fellows and directors at several Universities including the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

Edify Collabs have been a proactive member of the Catalyst community for over 18 months and have several successfully funded proposals in F7, F8 and F9 that are now ongoing or successfully closed out. https://linktr.ee/edify_collabs .

About Bridge Builders

Bridge Builders is an aligned team of highly engaged and committed Catalyst Community members coming together as a community driven Assembly to provide value to their environment through building bridges to corporates and investors.

We sensor and identify gaps within the ecosystem to co design and initiate required solutions. Bridgebuilders already created a bridge between many companies and the Cardano ecosystem including Ledger, Goodwall, Seedstars, Digifarm to name a few.

Many of the Cardano/catalyst projects, mainly bootstrapping, need support with investor & business development mentorship and channels.

In Fund 10 we have therefore presented 5 proposal covering different gaps that we have identified

• Fundraising support: Helping companies to create investor pitch decks and have a pitch event to venture investors
• Venture capital dealflow: Preparing a deal flow of companies to connect to investors
• Investor Conference: Promoting the ecosystem in a leading investors & tech conference
• Connecting tech 2 business: Supporting companies with business development activities
• Cyber security & Cardano: A collaboration with a leading cyber security company with the goal to make the ecosystem more attractive to corporates and investors

We look forward to continue collaborating with the community and try to fill up some of the gaps we see to promote the Cardano ecosystem

The aim of this proposal:

Conduct a series of workshops to the Cardano community and one on one support sessions for early stage companies (working on open source projects, or intend to work on open source projects) and aiming to raise seed funding.

Going through the process will help companies to better define their business objectives, strategy and roadmap (technical as well as business) and prepare a pitch deck.

At the end of the sessions we will invite VCs and investors and conduct an investor pitch event.

How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

The challenges ask the question: How do we make Cardano their (developers) first choice when it comes to building dApps, innovating and collaborating?

Some questions from the challenge brief:

• What do developers want, and how do they get it from the Cardano dev ecosystem?

• What would make a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create a dApp?

• Knowledge base & Documentation

Many developers teams have less experience with reaching out to investors, by providing this support we are able to give the teams some basic knowledge that will help them raise funding and keep growing their companies. This will be a beneficial service for the developers as well as for the ecosystem.

How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

Key Metrics to measure:

• Number of companies in the program
• Number of team members interested
• Number of companies ready with pitch decks
• Number of companies raising funds

We also aim that the process will impact the developer work to be aligned also around business objectives and not only tech roadmaps. We will evaluate the results by a feedback questionnaire at the end of the process.

The proposal will support a strong community of developers and proposers with project collaboration and information sharing and increase the number of open source projects that are getting funded from external funding (not Catalyst).

We will measure how many companies we supported, what was the knowledge level and interest to learn more and finally interest from investors following the pitch event.

Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

All project deliverables will be available to the community through the milestone reporting. The workshop will be open and available for the community. They will also be recorded and the presentation of the workshops will be available for the community as well as the final pitch event.

Finally, the team is well known in the community and very accessible. Our goal is to provide ongoing business development services to contribute to the growth of the ecosystem.

Per request of the companies we are supporting, some information might stay private.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

The Bridgebuilder team is active on the Cardano community and Ecosystem for over 2 years, including on project Catalyst. The team has a strong track record of contributing to the community and successfully completing funded projects. This specific proposal is highly related to the core activities of the team and we are already providing this support to a range of companies in the ecosystem through Edify and Bridgebuilders.

What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

Main Goals:

• Knowledge sharing with community
• Projects building on Cardano to prepare quality pitch decks for funding
• Connect to VC and investors
• Raise funds

The approach is very feasible as the team and partner have a strong experience and the proposal provides a practical approach for support and knowledge sharing. Things the project team is already doing.

Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

The work for this proposal

• Phase 1, Week 0-4:

• Prepare ppts and materials for the workshops

• Promotion of the workshops for the community through key channels such as Gimbalas, Cardano developer channels, Town Halls, Cardano Ambassadors

• Phase 2 week 5-8:

• 2 workshops by venture investors*

• 4 workshops about preparing a pitch deck

• Purpose: Vision and mission

• Product

• Go to market

• Roadmap

* we will try to match between the ventures and the best fit VC from our network (few names mentioned in the proposal)

• Phase 3 week 8-12:

• 90 minutes One on one sessions with companies - estimated 10 sessions

• Phase 4, week 14:

• Promotions to investors through our network

• Pitch event to investors and the community

Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Deliverables:

• 6 community sessions, 2 investors and 4 professional workshops that will be recorded as a knowledge base for the community
• at least 10 one on one sessions with companies
• Pitch event
• Feedback questionnaire

KPIs:

• Collaboration with VC and investors (Seedstars.com,Floriventures.com, nvgroup.org, www.emurgo.africa as an example), aim for 7-10 investors.
• 10s of participants at the workshops
• 5-10 companies to participate in the pitch event
• Within 6 months at least 2 companies to get investments

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Phase 1 - preparation:

• Project coordination 10 hours x 300 ₳ = 3,000 ₳
• Preparation of sessions & materials 25 hours x 300 ₳ = 7,500 ₳
• Community reach out and coordination 10 hours x 300 ₳ = 3,000 ₳

Total: 13,500 ₳

Phase 2 - 6 workshops:

• Project coordination 10 hours x 300 ₳ = 3,000 ₳
• Preparing and Conducting the workshops 20 hours x 300 ₳ = 6,000 ₳
• Community reach out and coordination 15 hours x 300 ₳ = 4,500 ₳

Total: 13,500 ₳

Phase 3 - one on one sessions:

• 10 sessions x 2 hours x 2 mentors x 300 ₳ = 12,000 ₳
• Community reach out and coordination 10 hours x 300 ₳ = 3,000 ₳

Total: 15,000 ₳

Phase 4 - pitch event:

• Preparing and Conducting the event 5 hours x 2 people x 300 ₳ = 3,000 ₳
• Community reach out, promotion and coordination 15 hours x 300 ₳ = 4,500 ₳
• Investors reach out, promotion and coordination 20 hours x 300 ₳ = 6,000 ₳

Total: 13,500 ₳

Admin, reports & others 4000 ₳

Total budget: 59,500 ₳

Total amount with 10% buffer: 65,450 ₳*

*The rates are calculated based on the current ADA value of 0.3 USD. We strongly believe ADA will go up overtime but it is important to have some protection for personal needs in case of volatility. Additional buffer of 10% is added in order to protect from decrease of ADA value. In case of increase in value we will adjust payments accordingly and use the additional amounts to provide additional services related to the proposal such as additional mentorship support.

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Bridge Builders team is very active on the Cardano ecosystem for over two years with strong relationships with CF, IO, Emurgo and many of the companies building on Cardano as well as the Cardano communities. We have onboarded many companies to Cardano and created fruitful collaboration. Some examples are Goodwall, Seedstars, Ledger, Pond.foundation, Digifarm and more. The team has a strong experience in supporting and mentoring projects building on Cardano.

We also partnered with Harry Hellyer from Edify (https://www.edifybusiness.co.uk) to provide the professional coaching sessions.

Yoram Ben Zvi – project lead

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoram-ben-zvi-446836/

Yoram has 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship, management, and business development, working with multinational teams. Since 2018, he has focused on helping impact-driven companies adopt technology solutions for community engagement, new business models, and social and environmental impact. Yoram is a cardano ambassador, active at Cardano4climate, New member onboarding challenge team, CA/VCA and overall very active in creating partnerships and onboarding companies to the Cardano ecosystem.

Harry Hellyer - Coaching lead

https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryhellyer/

Harry specialises in helping enterprises and organsations of all sizes and flavours, deliver scalable growth based around full-value based, impact innovation. He believes that Education should be delivered debt free - as a basic human right. And his focus is to support people to appreciate, attain and realise their full value. Previously he coached the NHS's Sustainable Development team to produce their first coordinated national vision and strategy rollout. He has coached and mentored hundreds of client members from small tech firms to global organisations, including Fellows at Cambridge University, and Imperial College London’s Education dept. For the last 18 months he has been actively involved in the Catalyst community, working with the Edify Colab team to deliver funded proposals in F7, F8 and F9.

Felix Weber – community lead

https://www.linkedin.com/in/felix-weber-339590209/

Felix has a strong track record of leading and implementing community governance, infrastructure, and innovation funds, demonstrating his passion for driving constant progress in the field. He is a Cardano and SingularityNET Ambassador, co-founded Catalyst Swarm and has initiated numerous grassroots projects and networks in the DLT ecosystem. Within Cardano and Catalyst Felix is also the initiator and Coordinator of the Ambassadors Guilds, Initiator and Coordinator of of Catalyst townhalls around the world, Elected Member of the Catalyst Circle version 1, Community Advisor,Challenge Team Member and Proposals Mentor.

Juliane Montag – executive advisor

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianemontag/

Juliane has 15+ years of experience in the professional service industry with focus on strategic planning, governance, stakeholder management, business development, PMO and talent in Latin America and Europe. Since 2020 she fulfilled several roles in the Cardano community, is actively involved in Blockchain community innovation and collaboration, as well as a Co-founder of Gimbalabs, dedicated to Blockchain Education.

Dean Taylor – investment advisor

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdeantaylor/

With over 25 years in the tech sector, Dean is a seasoned marketing executive with a deep understanding of "pre-chasm" marketing and partnership activities. He played a key role in the open-source movement as VP of Marketing and Channel Sales at Caldera Systems during the '90s, contributing to the company's IPO and market growth. Dean has been active on Cardano and Catalyst since 2022.

Nori Nishigaya – tech advisor

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishigaya/

Nori has 30 years of experience in software development, agile methodologies, management, and organizational systems design. Nori is dedicated to foster inclusiveness and community, building and exploring decentralized governance models, and enabling collaborative decision making in complex and emergent environments. He is also a co-founder of SAN₳, Cardano Ambassador and stake pool operator (SAMON pool). Nori also served as a Member of the Catalyst Circle Admin Team, Cardano4Climate, and Rapid Funding Challenge Team. He is also a Cardano Ambassador, CA, and Funded proposer.

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Providing a knowledge base regarding investment readiness is highly beneficial for early stage companies and to grow the ecosystem through becoming attractive to investors. The pitch event and connection to investors could be very impactful for the companies. The materials produced will serve as a knowledge base and can be further developed.