The 10 Most Innovative Blockchain Companies to Watch in 2023

Souri Govindarajan: Our customers unlock measurable supply chain value using our SaaS solutions and Modernization services.

BONbLOC is an advanced technology company pursuing a twin go-to-market approach through its Solutions and Services platforms.

BONbLOC provides SaaS solutions built on Blockchain and IoT technologies, and Modernization services using a range of technologies that improve the efficiency of supply chain operations, bringing more visibility and trust amongst trading partners in industries such as food services, and groceries, pharmaceuticals, automotive, retail, government, and more.

BONbLOC offers a proven digital transformation and legacy modernization service platform that many large enterprises have adopted for quickly moving their legacy and mainframe applications to cloud-based web applications using modern web applications and data science technologies.  Customers using our transformation and modernization service platform have realized the measurable value in bringing down their total IT cost by millions while quickly moving from legacy to web and mobile platforms.

BONbLOC plans to introduce its flagship SaaS solution platform, Onelign, in the 2^nd quarter of 2023, which will allow customers in a variety of industries to move their supply chain traceability and visibility to new levels of efficiency.

Onelign platform has at its core a processing engine built on blockchain, IoT, and data science technologies. The solution establishes a secure, single distributed data source common across a company's trading partners which in turn eliminates the need for multiple independent transaction silos. Onelign is among the earliest, if not the first, scalable enterprise blockchain SaaS supply chain solution in the industry.

The platform will be initially launched with edge data management as an application that will help customers capture and integrate temperature, humidity, liquid levels, gas levels, sound levels, pH levels, soil moisture, light intensity, and many such edge data into their supply chain data analysis and decision support methods.  The blockchain solution will enable customers to address many operational use cases such as food safety, patient monitoring, product quality tracking, agricultural productivity, etc.

The company has completed several successful pilots in asset tracking, livestock management, food safety, dairy, agriculture, and many more areas.  The company has signed up customers in the hospitality and distribution industries to monitor cold chain, food safety, and quality tracking operations.

A Commendable Trailblazer Treading Towards Scalable Solutions

BONbLOC was founded by Durai Appadurai & Souri Govindarajan, with a mission to become a market-leading innovative blockchain solutions company, powered by extraordinarily capable employees that customers find compellingly easy to work with.

In the last 3 years, the company has –

– grown its workforce to more than 150 people,

–  added development centers in 3 locations in the US and India

– expanded its global footprint in India, Europe, South America, and the United States and,

– won coveted recognition as "Best Company to Work For", endorsed by a whopping 99% of the company's employees in the survey managed by an independent survey organization.

– built a state-of-the-art  training academy to train hundreds of young graduates in IoT, Blockchain, AI, Web, and Mobile application development

– established partnerships and alliances in many technology areas that align with its vision to become the market-leading innovator in enterprise blockchain solutions

Leveraging Emerging Technologies to Improve Efficiencies

BONbLOC is a certified Hyperledger blockchain partner, that has drawn the attention of large enterprise software companies in the blockchain space and other ERP software providers interested in blockchain integration as well.  The company's solutions deliver  measurable value to every customer it serves in the Food Distribution, Restaurant, and Pharmaceutical Industries, examples include:

• Inventory write-offs reduced to zero resulting from real-time monitoring of cold chain food storage
• Millions added to operating margins due to reduced write-offs, accurate visibility across cold chain distribution, improved customer satisfaction, automatic reconciliation of transaction data based on critical business rules, etc.
• Potential savings of $50m recognized by a pilot customer now actively planning to implement supply chain reconciliation among its top 100 global supply chain partners
• Increased or sustained revenue due to improved customer confidence in food quality and safety, resulting in continuous monitoring  of various storage and hygiene operations at a leading restaurant chain
• Increased customer confidence and reduced operating losses by providing real-time tracking and reporting 'safe to use' conditions of high-cost medicines throughout its cold chain distribution process.

Dynamic Trio Driving Towards New Horizons

Durai & Souri between themselves brings more than 50 years of operational leadership experience in various industries across various business functions including product management, sales, supply chain operations, and information technology. As industry veterans and technology evangelists, they were returning from a customer meeting after discussing how to improve the trust factor in their customer's supply chain.  It seemed a viable option to combine the power of IoT, Web, and Blockchain to create scalable solutions that address the trust factor in the supply chain. Realizing the potential of blockchain beyond the cryptocurrency realm into enterprise operations, the two founders worked on a business idea brief at a coffee shop in Texas, USA.

Souri states "in a traditional supply chain technology environment, each partner creates their silo of the same supply chain transaction whether it is a sales, purchase, production or distribution event… blockchain disrupts that… there is no need to maintain multiple silos of the same transaction…Durai and I decided that we need to drive this disruption hard into enterprise operations and silo systems where the opportunity to improve trust and reduce costs is enormous… ironically, we created many of the silos ourselves in the last 30 years driving ERP and other types which were innovations back then".

Durai and Souri joined with Sakthi to create the company's first pilot solution which used IoT devices to track food safety data that could be stored in a blockchain to provide transparency and trust among all partners in the supply chain, from manufacturer to end consumer.  The solution was instantly accepted in the cold chain distribution industry.  Since that initial foray, the company has solved a variety of trust challenges in many industries:

• Tracking temperature, humidity, and similar data to ensure that food is stored in ideal settings, promoting quality and food safety
• Tracking liquid and gas levels in manufacturing settings to enable automated refilling (fuel) or draining decisions (waste) without disrupting operations
• Tracking sound levels in hospitality settings to facilitate a range of improvement measures in customer experience (restaurants) or patient care (hospitals)
• Tracking the authenticity of 'A1' milk, offering the consumer the opportunity to track information on the cow or herd, the source of the supply chain
• Tracking livestock movement so herders can rely on the information on the whereabouts of their herds, an important visibility need in rural areas
• Tracking the intensity of artificial lighting used in alternate farming (greenhouses, poly houses, etc.) which are fast becoming a critical source in food production

The founders believe that their idea has germinated into a solution that can today be positioned to solve a variety of supply chain trust problems faced by commercial industries as well as the socio-economic challenges faced by rural industries.

Delivering Best-in-Class Enterprise Solutions

BONbLOC's solutions are benefiting clients by providing increased visibility and transparency in its supply chains, which can help them to better manage their operations and reduce costs and provide enhanced visibility and transparency using this emerging technology. Additionally, the use of blockchain technology can also help to improve the security of supply chain transactions and reduce the risk of fraud.

Consequently, BONBLOC is utilizing blockchain technology to improve supply chain management and logistics, which is benefitting clients by providing increased visibility, transparency, and security.

Utilizing Disruptive Technologies to Create New Opportunities

Sakthi Raju, the company's VP of Products and Technology believes that disruptive technologies like Blockchain, IoT, AI, Big Data, and Cloud computing have a significant impact on today's innovations in scalable solutions using decentralized and secure data management.

According to Sakthi, AI in its elemental form can be used to improve the efficiency of the business process, for example, to help detect a breach of a safe storage temperature and quickly fix the condition causing the breach thereby saving millions in losses.  Advanced AI in the form of ML, VR, and AR can be used to predict potential breaches, plan mock inspections, train operations, implement digital twin techniques in manufacturing and quality control areas, etc., giving a simple yet rich-on-purpose user experience. For example, using our solution a dock loader can issue voice instructions in Spanish to temporarily hold temperature monitoring keeping his hands free to load, unload or arrange pallets on trucks and then continue to provide voice commands to resume monitoring of temperature,  all recorded in a system as a verifiable transaction without the loader keying in a single data – and without caring about the natural language processing element of AI that makes it possible. Big Data is being used to analyze and gain insights from blockchain data, which can be used to improve the overall governance of the network. Cloud computing is enabling decentralized blockchain networks to be more easily deployed and managed, making them more accessible to a wider range of users and organizations.

"By integrating these technologies with blockchain, it has the potential to create new business models and opportunities, open up new markets, and increase efficiency and security across various industries. Overall, the technologies can be used to improve user experience and make it more accessible and user-friendly," he adds.

Developing Customer-Centric Solutions

Souri believes that several factors make the firm innovative as it develops solutions that address the pain areas of the cold chain and supply chain using emerging technologies such as blockchain, the internet of things, and data science.  BONbLOC has a team that focuses on technology R&D to discover new solutions and opportunities. Being nimble, the company can adapt and respond quickly to changes in the market and industry.  Lastly, being customer-centric, understanding the needs of customers, and taking a user-centered approach in the design and development of software make the company stand out among competitors.

Tackling Competitors and Challenges

BONbLOC was started during the time the entire world started to see the pain of COVID-19 from all corners.  Some of the major operational and technology challenges the company faces include:

Competition: The blockchain industry is becoming increasingly competitive, with many companies vying for market share and investment.

High-cost development: The development of blockchain projects is expensive and makes it difficult for small companies like BONbLOC to compete with larger organizations.

Retention:  Due to changes in market conditions during and after COVID times, the company had to be constantly creative in incentivizing the resources.

Adoption:  Many organizations are still hesitant to adopt the technology due to a lack of understanding and trust in blockchain technology.

The Future Ahead

Based on the current trends and developments in the field of IoT and blockchain technology, it is very likely that BONbLOC will continue to grow and evolve in the future as the need for these technologies is becoming more prevalent in various industries.

Souri asserts that the increased adoption and integration of IoT and blockchain technology in various industries and businesses will drive the demand for BONbLOC's solutions.

Sakthi states that greater use of blockchain-based solutions in cold chain management will help companies to improve their product safety and compliance with government regulatory bodies.

The development of more advanced and secure solutions for IoT and blockchain will allow BONbLOC to offer more futuristic services to its clients.

Increased focus on the security and privacy of blockchain-based solutions will help to build trust and confidence in the technology.

Moreover, continued R&D and participation in open-source projects will lead to new solutions that can help BONbLOC to stay ahead of the competition.

Quote (Souri): Over US$100b in supply chain value is lost every year due to disconnected data.  The so-called connected supply chain isn't connected when it comes to critical data in safety, storage, and distribution operations. The convergence of IOT, Blockchain, and AI technologies along with a substantial increase in 5G adoption is bound to disrupt the status quo in trusted supply chains and continuous visibility. The adoption of blockchain is expected to grow in the coming years, driven by increasing adoption in various sectors such as the food industry, supply chain, finance, healthcare, and the public sector. Companies will continue to develop innovative products and services utilizing blockchain technology to improve efficiency, security, and transparency in their operations.

Executive Leadership: Durai Appadurai, Souri Govindarajan (CEO),  Sakthi Raju (Products), Venkata Raghavendra Kumar (Services)

Website: https://www.bonbloc.com/