Bluwhale is an AI intelligence layer that is turning your digital footprint into your most profitable asset. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Bluwhale CEO Han Jin to learn more about the company.
Han Jin’s Background
What is Han Jin’s background? Jin said:
“I was born in Germany and did my undergrad college at KIT there. I studied engineering and moved to Berkeley to go to graduate school, specializing in operations research, which allowed me to write some of the very early prediction and optimization models, including simulation models and neural networks for forecasting. I ended up in Silicon Valley and started my career at a Fortune 500 company writing more AI algorithms — something very rare because no one else was doing this in 2012/13. It was called the Big Data wave back then, but we did create very customized AI models to extract insights from big data.”
“In the last ten years, I’ve been working with my co-founder, building AI companies in the Web2 space, primarily specializing in building out data and personalization infrastructure for large enterprises when it comes to user profiling, user insights, as well as user behavior.”
“By 2016, I started a company called Lucid, where we were using AI to process videos into a range of formats, initially 3D/VR. And by the time of COVID, we settled on a good product market fit for short video content generation. AI could generate a preview of large 2-hour movies, showing only the content to the people who would be most interested in it to optimize engagement.”
Formation Of Bluwhale
How did the idea for Bluwhale come together? Jin shared:
“I learned from my last company how much user data was owned by the top 2% of all companies, creating a monopoly that stifled competition and the future growth of AI.”
“We assumed that if consumers are going to be sitting and transacting on-chain, ultimately their data would be there too allowing us to build similar AI infrastructure like we used to before. We also believe that the blockchain would benefit the individual as they can finally take control and ownership over their personal data while monetizing it. So we started building out the same AI layer that we used to build for the big companies, but this time, it was across blockchains. And that’s how Bluwhale came to be. Bluwhale is revolutionizing AI on the blockchain today. We leverage AI to connect users on-chain for targeted messaging and advertising. We aim to democratize AI capabilities for smaller companies and empower individuals to monetize their data securely on the blockchain. This puts the power back in the hands of the user and pays them for it, too!”
Favorite Memory
What has been Jin’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Jin reflected:
“The favorite memory was our consumer platform launch in April 2024. While having built consumer apps before in web2 and scaled them to more than 5M users, my expectations of first-day launches came down quite a bit. In web2, it could take you years to get to thousands of users, but in web3, it’s very different. On the first day, we had more than 30,000 users sign up, and we crossed 100,000 within the first week. This was a real experience of how explosive web3 can be. The main difference to web2 is that early traction can be fast, but keeping user engagement and retention high is way more challenging in web3.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Jin explained:
“We have created a platform that allows you to gain transparency on-chain and gain wallet insights for companies to target and reach out. As a consumer, you can polish your profile and make yourself more desirable, while companies want to market to you — paying you directly for your information and engagement. 90%+ of that spending goes to you, and Bluwhale AI only serves in matching and takes a tiny percentage of commission in between. This shift toward data ownership and control could redefine how individuals interact with the digital world and enterprises, placing users in control of their data and creating new economic models based on data as an asset.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Jin and the team faced in building the company? Jin acknowledged:
“For many Web2 founders, coming into the Web3 space could be very overwhelming, as the number of areas to think through triples. Also, as the space is quite undefined, it still operates like the Wild West without rules and regulations. What we thought of as common sense regarding structure and fair terms is completely thrown out the window. Therefore, we had to always stay alert on selecting partners, vendors, and investors that had very different agendas than us since not everyone is as long-term aligned with you as in web2. This often puts you at risk of falling for risky transactions or scams without even knowing what is happening to you. We had one of the cases where the marketing agency we hired started selling our tokens behind our back or trying to manipulate our Market Maker. As time passes those kinds of experiences definitely reshaped the way of operating in Web3.”
Lessons Learned
What is the biggest lesson you have learned as you started working in Web3? Jin replied:
“In Web3, much more than in Web2, it is crucial to choose the right people to come into your journey and help you build the company, especially scaling the business. It is critical to find the people that really believe in you. If you hire the wrong person, they can start breaking the company from the inside. It’s very harmful and literally collapses your company. It can be really harmful even if you pick the wrong suppliers or service providers. In Web3, this problem can be far more debilitating because it is a decentralized world. People work on what they are passionate about. Compared to Web2, having the right people believing in you and supporting them also makes a bigger difference, as those might not be directly employed by you, but their contribution makes your company more successful as the space lifts you up.”
Evolution Of Bluwhale’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Jin noted:
“Building a technology and transforming it into a product or even an application is not a straightforward path. Often the technology development process is more centered around you, while the product development cycle is centered around your potential customers. We had to drastically reduce the complexity of the technology when coming up with the Bluwhale platform. We talked to thousands of people and companies before we found one narrow feature that fit the 9 out of 10 requests we received. Customer obsession is not just a thing in web2, I believe it’s a mantra of entrepreneurship in general. We knew that AI personalization as a technology sounds very abstract, so we narrowed it down to one single value that personalization provides – matching.”
“Similar to Tinder, Bluwhale matches your wallet/profile with the right enterprises that you might be interested in, as well as those that want to reach you. This is the bullseye we took to start our journey of product-market-fit discovery.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Jin cited:
“We have gained traction so much faster in Web3 compared to our experience in Web2. We need both sides — customers and companies. We grew from 300 enterprise accounts to over 3000 enterprise accounts since January. It’s about 10x the Web2 growth within only six months. We have grown to 800,000 users — just since April, surpassing 30,000 in the first 24 hrs and 100,000 in the first week. The key to Web3 is not growth; it’s long-term retention and value creation by building a community that follows your brand like a cult.”
What are your company milestones to date? Jin emphasized:
“We are undertaking a Node Sale, set for September to December 2024, which will give early Bluwhale Master Node holders access to rewards and contribution capabilities on their smartphones, including long-term governance rights. In order to decentralize AI, we need all three components – data, storage, and compute. If we are able to tap into the 7 billion smartphones globally, we would be able to create an AI network that is decentralized by the people worldwide.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Jin about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Delabs Games is one of Korea’s largest web3 gaming companies with more than 9 million users. We didn’t just map out their current user base and match them with potential users but also flagged potential threats to their ecosystem, such as so-called Sybil wallets – farming wallets that create hundreds of wallets to collect airdrops. The company used the Bluwhale AI platform to extract insights for developing better product features, discussing listing with exchanges as well and showing traction to investors. The versatility of our AI solution attracts multiple ecosystem players to have a one-stop system creating transparency across multiple verticals.”
Funding
When asking Jin about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We raised $7 million to bring AI to the blockchain and supercharge dApps, so wallet holders can earn financial rewards for their profile data. The seed round was closed in September 2023 and was led by SBI, along with others and several top investors in web3, including Cardano, Momentum6, Primal Capital as well as Haseeb Qureshi (Managing Partner at Dragonfly), Charles Huang (creator of Guitar Hero), and Jack McCauley (founder of Oculus).”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Jin assessed:
“Given our most direct competition for data on-chain is the Graph, we are looking at a market cap of $1.6 billion. While the Graph is data only, we assume that scaling across mobile with storage and compute contribution will set us in the ranks of Filecoin ($2.2 billion) and Aethir ($2.4 billion). That means our potential total addressable market combining those three verticals by leveraging the smartphone could be $6.2 billion.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Jin affirmed:
“We are building a Helium network by leveraging mobile devices to decentralize AI in terms of data, storage and compute. Tapping into 7B smartphones worldwide and allowing individuals to contribute multiple resources at their fingertips and on-the-go is something nobody has tried implementing for AI across blockchains yet.”
“We have added AI to the mix so what we have goes far beyond data. Bluwhale can contextualize what the data means — like a brain — so the platform does an extraordinary job of matching enterprises with users who are highly open to the offers from those enterprises. This is an innovation no one else has brought to Web3, elevating the transparency in the web3 space and turning your digital footprint into your most profitable asset.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Jin concluded:
“Decentralizing AI requires much more than just data. Ultimately, you’d want to have all resources being contributed into your network that Google and AWS are currently offering on their platform – data, storage, compute – but in a decentralized way. The current node sale that puts Bluwhale nodes on people’s smartphones will dramatically increase the capabilities individuals have in our ecosystem. Going mobile will unlock capabilities for each wallet holder to not just contribute data, but also in the future storage and compute into our AI network, disrupting verticals in web3 that have been way too technical for mass adoption.”
