William Leonard
Hey, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I’m William Leonard, your host and investor here at Valor Ventures, a leading seed-stage venture capital firm in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, I’m really excited to host Anthony Maley, co-founder and CEO of Vouch.io. Anthony, welcome to the podcast.
Anthony Maley
Hey, William, thanks for inviting me. A real pleasure to be on your platform and to meet your audience.
William Leonard
Awesome. Let’s kick it off. I would love to have you educate our listeners on the Anthony Maley story?
Anthony Maley
Yeah, so probably from my accent, you can tell I’m not from around Atlanta originally. I was originally Scottish. I’ve traveled the world really. I’ve been all over the world performing CTO or Chief Architect Roles. I lived in Belgium for 10 years before moving to the Atlanta area eight or nine years ago now. As I said, I’ve been a chief architect or CTO for some incredibly large companies. The reason we got into our own startup, we’ve built so many successful products for those companies that we just had to do it for ourselves, to be honest, so that’s really my journey to Atlanta.
William Leonard
Awesome. You are Scottish originally, what did you study when you went to university? What were some of the early interests in your career that kind of brought you to this world?
Anthony Maley
I’ve got quite an unusual background in terms of I didn’t go to university. I kind of came through a time when computing was really emerging, certainly in Scotland, and the education system around that wasn’t so great. I picked up computing from a very young age and just felt I had a better chance of reaching goals by doing my own way, which was a bit of a gamble, I’ve got to say, but it worked out for me. I’ve worked for companies like Microsoft, etc. That’s vindicated my choice not to go down the traditional route, but certainly a bit of a gamble. But that’s how I got into real people and inspired me at a very young age people. But like Bill Hare, the Commodore, for example, really gave me the idea that I could do this on my own and concern myself with educational resources outside of traditional ways to learn and grow my career from the bottom up really.
William Leonard
Interesting story. How did you practically land here in the US? What brought you here to Atlanta?
Anthony Maley
I was working for companies like Microsoft in the UK. I’d worked for companies like Sony in the past, all in the UK, but got an opportunity to work for Toyota in Belgium. They were looking for someone to come and help them transform away from traditional manufacturing systems like mainframes to be more digitally focused. I went there and spent 10 years really helping them transform towards a more modern computing approach, I guess, is the best way to say that. And to Telematics and to mobile applications. After 10 years at Toyota, I was looking for a new challenge and a company and Atlanta reached out to me to do the same job for them but based in Atlanta, so that brought me here. I then moved on to a bank based here in Atlanta, and did the same thing for them, essentially. Like I said earlier, that that got me to the point of, “Hey, you know, I need to be doing this for myself and not just building products for these companies.”
William Leonard
Right. Can you talk to us about what Vouch is practically doing and what you’re building in the automotive space? What is Vouch? What are the solutions for your customers?
Anthony Maley
Let me just take a little step back there and explain how we got the idea for Vouch. I think that’s quite an interesting story to explain, what Vouch is really trying to do. When we started the company, I really wanted to do something. Breakthrough an emerging space, like blockchain, or smart cities, or IoT, or machine to machine. All of those areas were really interesting to us. We had many good ideas for products there but we always had the same problem. When we tried to connect to a machine or try to have a machine, we just didn’t know how to do that, right? We didn’t know how to do that securely. We had a scenario where it was a smart city landscape. How can I trust this device that I’m connecting to that hasn’t been tampered with? I just couldn’t answer that. And then the reverse of that was also true, how can that device trust me? How can that device trust another device and you think of connected cars or smart cities, that’s really the core of that whole use case. We actually pressed pause on our product ideas, mind to solve that problem, to make them viable. They actually solved that problem. That’s where those came from in solving that problem. We actually created a whole product platform for introducing absolute trust for humans and devices and devices to devices. We’ve built a platform that we can use to drive innovation through trust. We eventually tried to market that product as a kind of decentralized identity management platform, right? Big mouthful, big complex thing. But it was very difficult for us to explain to people how we could use that and what it does. Things weren’t so easy to sell at that point. What we decided to do was focus on one industry that we knew really well. A lot of our guys, they’re all very senior, but a lot of them have automotive experience. We thought, “Hey, hang on. Digital keys are about to emerge in this platform. Our platform can actually really solve this problem better than anything else that we saw.” We spent a lot of time tailoring our solution for that market. Our products in the automotive space can provide digital keys. For access and operation of a car, we can do that either embedded inside the car of a factory line. But we can also do that in an aftermarket way. Which means we can add one of our devices to a vehicle and allow companies like fleet companies to add digital key technology to their fleet. We’ve actually now extended that whole use case to use our identity, which really the core of our product is that digital blockchain identity, to allow for automotive devices to trust other automotive devices, and to also know who’s passing those commands all the way through a chain, so we can say, “William’s driving the car.” He’s trying to do this, as the owner of the vehicle, that’s okay. But perhaps if you’ve shared the key to a friend, and he’s trying to reset your vehicle or transfer ownership, maybe that’s not okay. Our platform can actually protect against that.
William Leonard
Interesting. So it sounds like this is almost bigger than automotive. It sounds like the Vouch platform can be used in multiple use cases besides automotive. Are there any other industries that you and the team plan on disrupting?
Anthony Maley
Great point. And, as I say, at our core, Vouch is really a digital identity platform. What we use to protect whether it’s a vehicle, or whether perhaps, it’s a hotel room door, or a home door, or a garage door, or an IoT device, really doesn’t matter to our platform. We’re really core and distro agnostic. But what we’re planning to do, William, is move from automotive, keep extending now, but move into the hospitality industry. That’s really where we’re aiming up. Hotels, complex campuses, for college, those kinds of spaces where we can really drive some interesting and unique use cases with trust.
William Leonard
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think you kind of hit the nail on the head on some of those high-touch areas, especially hospitality. When you think about Airbnbs, you think about hotels, and in the units, where there are multiple parties in and out daily, multiple times a week as well. That security is really imperative. I’m curious, Vouch’s approach to solidifying yourself as a market leader in this digital identity space. Can you elaborate on how you’re working to kind of build your moat? How are you different from your competitors in a sense?
Anthony Maley
Great question, actually. I think what we do that is different from most companies in this space, is we’re actually an end to end for our solution. It’s not just a blockchain-based solution, which is quite unique in itself. But we also built hardware for every industry or use case that we’re trying to get into. The reason we do that is Earth technology can actually protect hardware for secure boot or unauthorized access. We can really protect and build a chain of trust from the user using a phone perhaps or a device all the way through to the circuitry on the car or a hotel door or an Airbnb, any of these things, we can protect the end to end and that’s quite unique. That allows us to provide trust all the way through the use case. But where we’re really different is the use of blockchain. We don’t use traditional public key infrastructures, certificate-based things that a lot of companies use. That’s a very traditional way to do it. We use blockchain technology to provide something called medical proof, which is essentially something that can be verified by every single device or every single piece of software in that chain. We always know that when communication is moving from device to device, we always know that that is allowed. We can verify that in an offline way. We don’t need a central cloud server or anything like that for our solution to work. We can actually verify each step of the process, which is really quite an interesting use case. The other thing that really sets us apart there is organizational level keys, for example. If Amazon was to use our technology, every single person that works for Amazon could have a rule under that umbrella company. If your retailer for delivery accessed your home using one of our devices, an Amazon employee could be cascaded permission to do that, at the right time. Most of our competitors, or if not all of our competitors are very much in that detailed friend and family type sharing use case.
William Leonard
I just think that this is so interesting, and really a forward-thinking concept. I guess, as a customer in your current use case in the automotive world, we know Teslas can be accessed through their phone. Is Vouch better suited for electric vehicles or for any car? What is the most practical use case right now for Vouch in the automotive world?
Anthony Maley
It’s really any car, to be honest. Our technology will work just as well on the electric vehicle as it will on a traditional gas-powered vehicle. But what I will say about electric vehicles, and that’s a huge target market for us, as our technology is very low power-based, right? You know how to use any power, electricity is really used. Even though we’re using blockchain, for example, we use that in a very sustainable way. It’s a real key differentiator for us. A lot of people think about blockchain is the thing that’s destroying the planet for mining, cryptocurrency. Actually, we have the complete opposite end of the earth power consumption on a vehicle or even on our several levels is incredibly little. Something we are targeting is to help not just electric, but also solar car manufacturers. One of our clients is a solar car manufacturer in Europe right now. We’ve really helped them reduce their power consumption for things like immobilizers and digital keys.
William Leonard
Gotcha. There’s also a consumption aspect to it as well, which is interesting. I want to shift gears here a little bit, Anthony. You’ve been building Vouch for a little bit of time now and you’ve obviously found some success and product-market fit. I’m curious, do you have any insights or unique perspectives on building a company at the early stage for other founders? Because a lot of our listeners are founders at the idea stage or founders who are pre-seed and they need to take that next step in their business to get to that next vector of growth. You’ve achieved that. I’m curious, do you have any insights, any perspectives on how to build successfully, particularly here in the southeast United States? I
Anthony Maley
I have a few things that I can share that were certainly very useful for our company. I think the most important one was finding a unique use case to focus your product or service on. When we started, we really tried to solve the world’s problems, right? We had a platform that could literally be used for anything. We were so proud of that. Every time we had an opportunity, we would tell everyone that we can solve world hunger and make everything perfect. But people don’t know how to buy that, right? People don’t know how to buy such power. They have a very acute problem and they just need help with that normally. Focusing on automotive, for example, really allowed us to build our company and get traction, made it very easy for us to focus, find the right customer, get the right marketing, get the right narrative for a product, even though it’s just a small percentage. Then each of the possibilities, you have to resist the urge to tell the world how good you are, and just really focus on one thing that you can sell, and then grow your company based on that. That’s the first thing that I would say, certainly, from a southeast perspective. The only way we got there to that realization was by leveraging some contacts we have here in the southeast and have some mentors. We are actually part of the ATDC in Georgia Tech. We’ve had some incredible mentorship that has helped us really focus and really find a path and a narrative. The mentors have certainly been through a lot personally, and they can give you some good advice. My advice to people out there who are getting started is to take all that advice. People tell you advice for a reason. Usually, it’s because it works, right? That approach really, really helped us listen to all our mentors and applied that wisdom. It’s worked out for us.
William Leonard
I was gonna ask you, you’ve lived in Belgium and Europe for some years, and you’ve seen those entrepreneurial environments, and you moved here to the US and saw the environment here. Were you thinking of building Vouch anywhere else except for Atlanta or the southeast? Was there any other geography that you thought you could build in? Why did you really ultimately choose Atlanta to build here?
Anthony Maley
Yes, an amazing question. Europe and the US have very different startup cultures. Berlin, for example, in Europe is very hard. There’s a lot of hot places. But the approach there is very different, right? It takes some real dedication and some luck to start a company in Europe and be successful. In the US, there’s more availability of finance, and there’s a bigger market for you to hit, right? Once you’re inside the US, it’s much easier to make those sales. To be honest, not all sales are easy. Sales are impossibly hard at times but there are more opportunities here to make a sale than in Europe. But to be honest with you, it’s only because of the kind of startup culture in Atlanta that has really grown over the last 10 years. That’s enabled us to do what we’ve done. ATDC, all of the different VC companies that are in Atlanta, we’ve spoken to most of them and taken advice. Even our lawyers are based in Atlanta, and the advice based on who to speak, where to go, how to do things has been invaluable. Actually, Atlanta is the perfect place for a startup right now, in my mind, and I don’t think we would have been as successful without this approach.
William Leonard
I think you hit the nail on the head there with all the resources here, like ATDC. They’re just an invaluable addition to any startup looking to build here in the metro Atlanta area and throughout Georgia as well. You pair that with the college talent that is here in the city as well. Georgia Tech, Clark, Atlanta, Morehouse, Spellman, Georgia State, Kennesaw State, you have all these universities with such advanced programs that really immerse their students into the real world, throughout undergrad.
Anthony Maley
That’s a great point. Something I should mention is, we see Atlanta as the central hub to the company. Right now, we’re very geographically split as a team, right? We’re all over the world. Frankly, our team in Atlanta is where I really want to grow the core of the company as we become bigger and bigger and it’s because of the available resources like you mentioned which are such an attraction to a company like ours.
William Leonard
Yeah, definitely. How big is the team right now? And you said you’re kind of spread out all over the world. What are some of the interesting geographies where you have team members?
Anthony Maley
We have 27 team members now. We’re growing very fast. That number may even change today. We’re going across but we have people, obviously in Atlanta, and in the US with people in New Orleans, Colorado, California, and New York, Virginia. We have people in Poland, UK, Portugal. We have quite a few people in Belgium actually. South America, we have people in Brazil, and we’re very geographically spread as a team. People in India also, actually.
William Leonard
Oh, wow. So almost every continent, you’re almost there.
Anthony Maley
We’re trying.
William Leonard
That’s awesome. I think it’s critical to touch on something we spoke about earlier in the podcast and how Vouch is really seeking to be applied in more than just the automotive use case. How do you practically get to that next use case? What are some of the testing the customer discovery that you have to go through? A lot of our listeners may have more than one use case, similar to Vouch, but getting to that next vector is difficult because you’re so used to selling into one. How do you prepare the team? How do you refine your sales approach to go into that next vertical?
Anthony Maley
Amazing question again, William. Our approach to that is to use some traditional methods, but also some kind of, perhaps unusual methods as well. We’re always looking at industries to kind of match our technology fit to the problems in that industry. We use very traditional methods there of looking at gaps, doing competitive analysis, speaking to people in that industry to find out what they think is missing and what problems they have, what costs they’re trying to reduce, where they’re trying to increase security, or reduce friction to do all that kind of thing. But we also build prototypes and take them to the market. For example, the ideal customer that we don’t have but we’d love to have is Airbnb. The reason for that is, every time we do a kind of analytical study or prototype, everyone always says, “Oh, this is like Airbnb.” or “Airbnb can really use this.” It’s not just people in the industry, people who have used Airbnb services, they can see how it can be applied. We actually build real hardware and real software. We actually put it in those situations, and we get people to try it. And then based on that, we then take those findings, and to those industries, to get some support, maybe some press coverage, etc, and then grow the product based on now. But it’s really helped us a lot is to actually have something physical and tangible to demonstrate.
William Leonard
Definitely. I think that’s the smartest and most direct approach, right? Get that direct feedback from the exact use case that you’re looking to build. Really interesting insight there. As we’re wrapping up the call here, you’ve been building in this space for almost five years now. I’m curious, what is your take on the state of innovation within the digital identity space? How far are we from seeing widespread use cases here in the United States specifically?
Anthony Maley
I think there are so many different exciting startups and even established companies in the identity space trying to break through in this area. I think you’ll see things emerge month by month. Right now, what was really interesting, though, is people need a frictionless experience, but also for it to be very secure, right? What does that mean? Well, for us, that means we need to remove things like passwords, and we need to remove things like a shared secret. That’s something that is passed between your browser or your phone app, or your device to our server that someone can copy or steal. Our solution does away with both of them. It makes it really impossible for people to pretend to be you. They literally have to be you and have your device to represent you. That’s really a huge step forward and innovation on identity and trust. We’re probably not unique in that area. But we’re probably more advanced than most places and most companies. In a lot of the traditional companies like Microsoft or a Ford truck, they’re still stuck to that centralized model where they have a big central server that people can attack. We’re very decentralized, for example, but it’s clear that everyone needs this problem to be solved. I think you’re gonna see some really interesting, more frictionless, more secure solutions, coming to your home, your office, and the apps that you use coming real soon.
William Leonard
I think that’s an interesting point because you touch on a frictionless experience. Think about the restaurant industry, right? You know, they’re not taking cash anymore. They want you to pay with your phone. If you go out to eat, you can check out at your table, you don’t even have to interact with the waiter at a lot of places. I think that’s going to translate to a multitude of industries. I’m excited to see how Vouch really inserts itself in the hospitality world and how you continue to insert yourself in the automotive world as well. I’m really excited about that. Anthony, I think this has been a great conversation and really insightful. You definitely educated me on this space. I think our listeners will find great value, as well. Really excited to see the growth and expansion that Vouch experiences over the next few months. Appreciate you joining me, Anthony, and we’ll have to do it again.
Anthony Maley
Indeed. Thank you, William. It’s been a real joy for me. Amazing questions. I hope your listeners enjoyed it.
William Leonard
Yeah. Cheers, Anthony.
Anthony Maley
Thank you.
Lisa
Thank you for listening to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. You know, we’re not just a podcast, we’re a community, and we’d love to see you at one of our digital or physical events, go to valor.VC and sign up for an event that makes sense for you. We have events for founders and the investors who back them. Another event you might enjoy is Startup Runway. The Startup Runway Foundation is a Valor organization that provides $10,000 grants to founders who are women or people of color building next-generation software products. Applications are free and we’d love to hear from you at startuprunway.org. And as always, thank you so much to the organizations that make this podcast possible. Not only Valor Ventures, but also Write2Market, a tech marketing and PR agency in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Startup Runway Foundation and Atlanta Tech Park Valley’s headquarters, and also headquarters for over 100 local entrepreneurs, building global businesses. See you next week. Please bookmark the podcast and join us.
