Big Whale Labs

Mission & Key Concepts

Big Whale Labs is a startup in the intersection of consumer social, privacy, and crypto. We are applying various cryptographic techniques such as zero knowledge proofs, e2e encryption, etc to allow people to verify information, credentials, and facts and socialize without doxxing themselves.

We believe the future of social and identity on the internet needs to be private, verifiable, and decentralized.

Our product is called ketl - silicon valley anonymous, a pseudonymous social network for founders and vcs.

Our protocol is sealcred.xyz - a social and identity protocol that allows people to verify facts and information without doxxing themselves. Our product is in alpha and we’ve minted over 100,000 credentials for 20K unique wallet addresses to date.

Current Challenges

1/ What company level problems are big whale labs solving?

The core problem we are solving at big whale labs is: individual privacy and autonomy for the next phase of the internet

• Privacy is considered a human right because it is essential to the protection of individual autonomy and human dignity. It allows individuals to freely express themselves, form personal relationships, and make important life decisions without fear of discrimination or state surveillance. Privacy also provides a space for individuals to protect their personal information and data, which is increasingly valuable in today's digital age.

Moreover, privacy is recognized as a fundamental human right in various international treaties and laws, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. The right to privacy is crucial for ensuring individual freedom and autonomy, and for maintaining a democratic society that values individual rights and dignity.

• Internet autonomy will be unlocked through decentralized technologies that allow people to interoperate freely. The guardians of web 2 stole your data, your contacts, in exchange for access to their walled gardens. The future of web 3 and the metaverse are starkly different.

2/ What protocol level problems are big whale labs solving?

Sealcred.xyz - private, portable credentials powered by zero knowledge proofs and OBSS

• Open blockchains have unique privacy issues: everything is indexed and traceable
• Zero knowledge proofs allow you to create provable statements without revealing unnecessary data
• Private and portable credentials allow users to create anonymized credentials that give them access to opportunities

3/ What product level problems are big whale labs solving?

Ketl.xyz - honest tech conversations for founders and vcs

• Founders and VCs do not have a forum where they can discuss things in an open, honest, way without jeopardizing their identity
• ie: What are fair terms for a 1.5M seed round at 20M cap for a SaaS company
• ie: I’m an associate currently being harassed by a partner
• ie: A board member is trying to F*@K me over and blocking my acquisition
• ie: One of my investors started a similar company and won’t respond to my emails
• ie: I’m having issues with my cofounder, what can I do to fire him?
• ie: Has any founder recently raised money from Sequoia? What do we think about their China team?

History & Achievements

Founded: 2021

Big Whale Labs was founded by Jason Kim (2nd-time founder, YC alum) and Nikita “borodutch” Kolmogorov (80M+ users across his apps, prior exit to 1Inch) who were roommates in their freshman year of college.

We’ve raised 4.4M in seed funding from industry veterans like Balaji Srinivasan, Slow Ventures, Road Capital, M13, SamsungNext, founders of Tornado Cash, 1Inch, Utopia Labs, and more.

Core Team

We’re a semi-distributed team with an office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn NYC. We meet at least once every 3 months in person.

• Jason Kim, Co-Founder & CEO
• Nikita Kolmogorov, CTO
• Matt Whettsell, Design
• Pratyush Tiwari, Cryptography