- Her start-up, The GIANT protocol, is transforming bandwidth into a global, digital asset.
- The project has collectively raised $5M+
A new start-up is making waves in Silicon Valley ever since it made its public debut in November last year. The company is the brainchild of Suruchi Gupta, a passionate Indian Female Founder, who got her start by winning hackathons after emigrating to the US to pursue her Masters in Computer Science less than a decade ago. Suruchi wanted to pursue her passion for technology to create something that will impact the lives of billions, and the result was GIANT (Global Internet Access Network Token) Protocol, a leading-edge web3 protocol to decentralize and democratize access to the internet and financial services. The tokenized bandwidth platform will partner with telecommunications companies and connectivity providers worldwide to create a new distributed connectivity economy that tokenizes bandwidth, essentially allowing anyone with a mobile phone to access the internet and become an owner simply by going online. Suruchi founded the company with support from college friend Jinesh Doshi, who is also from Mumbai. The pair have formed a close collaborative working relationship over the past 10+ years.
GIANT Protocol was founded with the ambition of launching a decentralized connectivity economy that can address multiple challenges in the telecom industry. It envisions turning internet connectivity into a digital asset and creating a new web3 layer, which will align incentives of all parties, enabling the formation of a novel economic platform that is open to all, seamless and secure by design and governed by the community.
“At GIANT, we believe an Internet that works for everyone can only be built together– and it’s critical we leverage this for humanity over the coming decades as we try to find our way to a more just and sustainable world”, says Suruchi Gupta, Founder and CEO. She adds, “There are more than 5bn mobile phone users that spend over $2 trillion to access broadband and mobile internet every year. By transforming this bandwidth into a virtual currency, GIANT provides an on-ramp to web3 by simply going online. It is a simple, intuitive, and practical solution that turns our phone numbers into wallets and mobile minutes and mobile data into real world value for users.”
The company recently announced that it has raised USD $5 million in a seed funding round led by pioneer blockchain-focused investment firm, CoinFund. The Protocol is in an advanced stage of development, and the project has also hired a world-class team of executives hailing from Juniper, Salesforce, Roku, Mobile365, and others. They have more than 100 years of collective experience from sectors including telecoms, security, and consumer tech. GIANT has also closed agreements with some of the largest telecommunication providers in the world.
Ms. Gupta adds about the importance of the venture, “Decentralized protocols offer significant promise to create a more inclusive and global economy as well as enabling and incentivizing the sharing of resources such as bandwidth. However, compared to the relative ubiquity of the internet and smartphones, decentralized platforms currently remain inaccessible due to the knowledge and technical gaps for non-users of digital currencies. GIANT will serve as a global enabler of decentralized financial services via connectivity as a digital asset of value, which is very difficult to achieve using the current centralized economic systems.”
Access to the internet and financial services are no longer a luxury, it represents a basic human right. For countries like India which are looking to boost their digital literacy and financial inclusion, GIANT represents not only a practical solution, but also an inspirational success story of an Indian Female Founder working to make technology benefit the masses.
