Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Evgen Verzun, CEO of Kaizen Finance (Part 1)

Ukrainian serial entrepreneur Evgen Verzun discusses the cesspool of Cyber Security problems within the Crypto space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Evgen Verzun: I’m the founder of Kaizen Finance. I’m a serial entrepreneur. Before this, I and my team had launched many different companies, primarily in the cyber security space. Slowly, we started helping companies in the crypto industry to help solve their cyber security problems. We decided that we have enough knowledge to help this industry. We launched the platform where we are helping startups to become successful in crypto.

Sramana Mitra: Take a use case that you solve and walk me through it in a fair bit of detail.

Evgen Verzun: It’s a pretty tough question. To give you an example, I’m a scientist. I have many technology patents. We try and solve complex problems. 99% of startups die before they even get funded. Then 99% die after funding before MVP. Our survival is just a small percent.

It’s not really hard science to be successful. It’s more about experience and knowing problems. If you start analyzing problems, they’re kind of the same. We started solving pretty specific problems like cyber security attacks. Let’s say you have $100 and expect to gain a thousand tokens. The hackers buy before you and sell to you. For the same money, you receive ten tokens. They buy it, and when the price goes up, they sell it to you. You can’t do anything about it.

We’re 100% successful in protecting tokens from this vector of attack. It can drain up to 30% of liquidity. Just imagine. You raise $100,000 and 30% goes to hackers. It’s huge. We solve that. You can lose money throughout your project. We propose our solution and they subscribe later when there’s already a huge loss. We combine many small services and create a platform.

We create a one-stop shop. Companies will have all tools for protection, creating tokens, and launching. We decided that instead of solving one problem, we give them a set of tools. It’s like a Swiss knife. There are whole projects built on just one feature in our portfolio. Dropbox solves a simple problem and they’re a unicorn. We think differently. Instead of having tons of contractors, it should be one reliable partner who ensures that they will receive a high level of support and service.

Sramana Mitra: Your customers are crypto startups?

Evgen Verzun: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of that market? How many crypto startups are out there right now?

Evgen Verzun: It’s a tough question. We can check.

Sramana Mitra: How do you decide whom to go after?

Evgen Verzun: It works vice versa. Any startup has several stakeholders. They have investors and users. There is a path through it. First of all, they just have an idea and try to chase investors. Then they come up with an incubator that knows how to convert the idea into a business. We work with startup accelerators and aggregators. When they receive advice on how to do it, we give them a tool to implement their product. We come and say how.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Evgen Verzun, CEO of Kaizen Finance
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