Moment of truth for 'most promising startup' GridMarkets: Page 2 of 2

Angel-founder funds combo
 Moment of truth for 'most promising startup' GridMarkets: Page 2 of 2
GridMarkets’ first angel investor is the managing director of “a major investment bank in New York” who was not only intrigued at the possibility of GridMarkets taking off, but had himself considered attacking the problem, years earlier, according to Ross and Hakim.
 
Which brings us to the fact that, technically, the concept GridMarkets is proposing has been around for a long time, with “the underlying technology to do this [having been] around for at least 50 years,” says Hakim.
 
That does not mean this was an easy challenge to solve. The fact that only GridMarkets is attempting it speaks of the technical, commercial and legal challenges.
 
Indeed, Hakim acknowledges that GridMarkets’ launch has been delayed due to the difficult technical challenges that go into building a platform for institutions to supply their excess computing (or CPU) capacity to other institutions with high computational needs, using cloud and grid-computing technologies.
 
This is despite the fact that he has a very strong technical team in place. “We are really pushing the boundaries here in terms of what can be done and we are talking about serious, heavy-duty industrial software at work,” he adds.
 Moment of truth for 'most promising startup' GridMarkets: Page 2 of 2
“We have limited resources and the problems are technically complicated, hence [it is] taking us some time to solve. But, we are in a good place now and wrapping up our beta test to go live with three, four clients within the next four weeks,” says Hakim (pic).
 
Digital News Asia (DNA) contacted one of its users, a cloud service provider in Hong Kong, who spoke highly of the value proposition that GridMarkets brings to the table.
 
“It is a great proposition for us to be able to monetise our spare CPU resources. Plus, they were responsive and improved on their client which sat on our side.
 
“We had control over it and could spec out how much of our resources GridMarket could use and we could prioritise how our memory and CPU resources could be used,” said the executive from Hong Kong.
 
Meanwhile, the limited resources include the US$200,000 they have raised from two angels, plus the money Hakim and Ross forked up themselves, which is more than the US$200,000 raised from angels.
 
While the technical, commercial and legal challenges have mostly been dealt with, the real test will come when they go live and their B2B (business-to-business) platform for both buyers and sellers of excess computational capacity comes on-stream.
 
“We have a lot of interest from investors and are currently at various stages of due diligence but what we know for sure is that they all want to wait for the results with the initial four customers before they commit to us,” says Hakim.
 
The moment of truth is upon GridMarkets.
 
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