Cofound.it is rapidly expanding, in terms of internal resources, external partnerships and community driven efforts. We’re now leveraging our experience and tech base to start developing the CFI protocol for startup creation and funding process — a trustless, distributed, value-added protocol making full use of the CFI token.

TL;DR video

Cofound.it’s goal has always been to bring the benefits of a vibrant local startup ecosystem to the whole world. Access to capital and experienced entrepreneurs, professionals and service providers help the startups overcome the constant challenges on their road to success. We want to kickstart the next stage of the global economy using the CFI token by engaging thousands of startups, millions of experts and tens of millions of investors and supporters.

Over the last year we have gained invaluable experience in funding startups via token crowdsales. We did it ourselves and helped incredible teams worldwide. We wanted to learn as much as possible about the really hard problems that we should try and solve in the months and years ahead.

In a blockchain world, rich protocols enable distributed and efficient standardization of complex business processes. We’re now certain that the startup world clearly requires a unified protocol that can connect sources of funding and help with company formation and capitalisation process — in a trustless and distributed way. Cofound.it is building that protocol.

The CFI protocol will allow all participants in the funding market to interact with each other and build services on top of it. In a market place typically driven by personal trust and relationships, expanding the use of the CFI token to align interests this will solve the problems of trust between participants typically found in these situations.

Using the CFI protocol, existing accelerators, incubators and emerging platforms like Cofound.it will be able to interact and share resources in a much more efficient manner. It will also enable traditional institutional investors to invest into blockchain based startups and crypto funds can interact directly with startups in a standardised way.

In time, anyone will be able to rely on the CFI protocol for high quality startup information and evaluations, access to major institutional investors, underwriting services in the distributed economy, automatic and compliant company formation processes and many other things — all of this at a global scale. To be clear: the CFI protocol will be a facilitating layer that any startup can tap into to increase its chances of success and will not be limited to startups working with Cofound.it.

A core value of Cofound.it is to support the growth of a global distributed economy. We will help and support important projects and initiatives that take us towards that goal as much as we can. Please reach out if you are working on something exciting!

Another core part of Cofound.it has always been our focus on evaluations. With the boom of token crowdfunding, separating the great from the mediocre becomes even more important. Last year we started two projects in order to scale the capacity to do high quality evaluations on a global scale (the seed program and community evaluators). We will expand both, using the Cofound.it website as the core platform where we deploy, test and optimise the new features of the emerging ecosystem.

Compliance and legal structure is a vital piece of any successful startup. We are building a legal development team to focus on this from an international perspective. While developing the section of the protocol that will enable an automated company formation process, we will continue to work on and share our best practices with the community.

For Cofound.it, 2017 was about learning and building a solid foundation. Going forward 2018 will be about expanding and scaling to fulfill the vision (see our 2022 blog) we have about changing startup funding forever.

Want to do it together with us? We are now opening offices around the globe and are recruiting in London, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Ljubljana and San Francisco! See our jobs page for details.

Written by Daniel Zakrisson (@danielzak), follow on Twitter for latest updates.