Every week we feature a new startup at Fundsup that forces a radical breakthrough. This time we chat with Mieszko Czyzyk, co-founder of THX.
Read the Dutch version on Emerce.
Hi Mieszko, what exactly are you doing?
I’m the founder of THX, together with Peter Polman. THX allows you to embed incentives in any app. You use it to create loyalty programs and other types of gamification. ‘THX’ is short for ‘thanks’; we chose the name to emphasize the happy feeling you get when receiving a gift from someone.
I have a background in software entrepreneurship. For more than two decades, I have seen the digital landscape evolve; the ongoing shift from large social networks to more personal experiences fascinates me. Hundreds of thousands of organizations are looking for new ways to engage people. I believe that gamification and, more broadly speaking, programmable money will play a huge role in aligning people around shared goals.
I’m lucky to have Peter as a co-founder. He’s the type of person that can turn a long-term vision into a practical solution and bring it to life through his code. I have seldom seen a more hard-working engineer. Together with him and our small team, we love pushing the boundaries using the latest online technologies. Going from zero to a product that makes a customer happy is a great feeling that is impossible to beat.
Where do you see its main application?
For now, we’re focusing on software vendors that reward certain behaviours in their apps. It’s ‘gamification-as-a-service’ if you will. In order to scale it up, we developed a number of extensions for popular community and chat applications such as Slack, Discord, and Open Social which in turn runs on an open-source content framework called Drupal.
As part of a Horizon 2020 grant, we’re exploring more fintech-like capabilities that allow money management and peer-to-peer payments, and possibly even lending. This iteration on our infrastructure will be ready around October this year.
Our infrastructure helps save thousands of hours of precious development resources.
What is the impact of your business?
We’re using blockchain technology and open standards where end-users stay in control of their data as much as possible. This also makes the infrastructure we offer more secure for our customers. That’s a very different mindset than the intransparent software back-end of most organizations today. Which, especially for end-users, leads to privacy problems and data breaches.
For our customer – the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – we enable hundreds of gamified transactions per day. They use our system to reward employee engagement on their digital platform SparkBlue. Now the UNDP can manage the policy discussions in a much more detailed manner, reaching the right experts on certain topics where before these people were hard to pinpoint.
For our customer – the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – we enable hundreds of gamified transactions per day.
Using our API-based infrastructure and the open-source Open Social platform, UNDP saved hundreds if not thousands of hours developing a similar gamification system from scratch.
Where do you stand right now?
We’re in beta and serving paying customers. The infrastructure has proven itself to reward thousands of engagement interactions daily.
We have an automated signup flow and self-service dashboard. Customers can deploy their integration for free while testing the solution and start paying when they go live to their end-users. Setting up an account takes minutes as you only need an email address and a few clicks.
We’re part of the BlockIS incubator and the Plug and Play accelerator informal ‘Booster’ program which gives us access to pitching opportunities and numerous experts to tackle challenges. So we’re definitely not doing this on our own.
Who has invested in you and what kind of investors are you looking for?
Like I touched on briefly before, we’re part of two Horizon 2020 European grants. They and our technology partner Polygon have invested a bit over €90.000,- in the beta version of our software.
Taking the next step for us means investing in inbound marketing, community building, and customer support. We are looking to raise €300.000 in equity plus an additional negotiable allocation of $THX, our platform native blockchain token.
Our ideal investor profile is someone that has scaled a software business in Europe and beyond, knows SaaS and ideally also IaaS, and is excited to explore tokenized business models.
Best of luck with everything!
Thanks, check out our pitch deck in the Fundsup app: https://api.fundsup.co/go/kLUGBtbgAD