Accounting giant Ernst & Young has announced that it has selected six startups to participate in its EY Startup Challenge 2016 that will focus on exploring and developing blockchain technology to tackle two key industry challenges – digital rights management and energy trading.
According to the official release by Bitfury Group, the third annual startup challenge will see six selected startups including Adjoint, BitFury, BlockVerify, BTL Group LTD, JAAK and Tallysticks and will have the opportunity to spend six weeks beginning on 12th September 2016. The startups will move into an innovation hub in the office space of technology accelerator in Canary Wharf, London.
“We are hugely excited to explore together with these six startup businesses how blockchain can be used to transform digital rights management and energy trading. These two key areas are ripe for change and we believe blockchain has the potential to bring about notable enhancements in productivity and transparency. We think that the prospective impact of this technology outside of the financial services sector is enormous, and we look forward to exploring this collaboratively,” Jamie Qiu, founder of the EY Startup Challenge said.
The selected startups will have access to a selection of mentors from EY and EY’s clients, series of educational workshops, and regular contact with market leading businesses. The program will end on 20th October with a demo day where the startups will demonstrate the solutions they have built.
The solutions and prototypes that are developed and built by the selected startups during the course of six weeks will have the opportunity to be further developed to a pilot state with EY, if selected. It will be provided with ongoing, hands-on support and longer-term access to EY’s network, resources, and expertise.
“The EY Startup Challenge will fuse the best thinking from the Blockchain startup community with EY’s people and clients to produce functioning solutions that demonstrate the art of the possible,” Rahul Gautam, Partner and Head of TMT Advisory Services, EY UK and Ireland said.
