Brú.Finance is a blockchain-based lending platform that uses NFTs to represent commodities owned by farmers. It has won awards for innovation in agriculture and fintech. In 2022, it plans to go live on the mainnet, expand its asset classes, collaborate with international partners, build its community, and become a DAO. Its goal is to promote financial inclusion through DeFi.
We had a great year by embarking on this incredible journey and 2021 brought us here after we explored the incredible ecosystem that is DeFi. Our mission began with opening up access to the value of real-world assets with DeFi lending and borrowing which led the way for Brú.Finance to take shape and form.
We aimed at creating this access to finance by opening up opportunities for everyone across the globe. Those with a bank account or without it, people having an appetite for the volatility of crypto assets or even those who want to live with the safety of bank deposit, those belonging to economies with negative yield or from the emerging world, both banked as well as unbanked population.
With that said we’d like to walk you through our achievements and our vision for the future with Brú.Finance
When we began, we were (and still are) focused on bringing financial inclusion in the agriculture sector by providing liquidity to farmers. This led us to develop a robust Blockchain TradFi arm–a blockchain-based lending platform that enabled commodity finance through NFTs representing commodities owned by farmers. This helped Indian farmers put their harvest in the custody of a warehouse as collateral and borrow money against it. This solution took off the ground positively and assured us that we were heading in the right direction.
It helped farmers avoid socio-economic problems by:
This was a victory for us as we could help set over 8,000 farmers on a sustainable trajectory where they could reclaim their power and get the right value for their harvests and disburse loans worth INR 240 Million within a short span of one year.
And thus, we built a strong TradFi arm that led to the next phase–connecting this robust platform with the flourishing DeFi space.
Based on our success, we focused our efforts on building Brú.Finance. After pulling in the best of our time and resources, we built a product that successfully moved $US 100 million worth of assets in testnet NFTs, deploying Brú.Finance on Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain.
We worked hard and fast to set the path ahead for ourselves and we were recognised for our achievements throughout the year, by organisations of repute, in our home country as well as across the globe. For both our DeFi & Blockchain TradFi arms.
We won the Social Impact Bounty Winner — ETHDenver, USA as one of the top five projects and as the best dApp, tool, extension, plugin or fix on ConsenSys Quorum.
We were awarded the title of Best Digital Intervention in Agriculture by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in 2021
We were the runners-up at the Build for Bharat programme by Binance, a DeFi-focused Hackathon in India, based on the vision of the initiative — Polaris Accelerator Programme: an initiative designed under the Blockchain for India Fund.
We won the title of Innovation in Fintech category from the FinTech India Innovation Awards (FIIA)
We were selected as one of the Top 5 startups in SDGi Accelerator — UN Technology Bank & UNDP Turkey
We were shortlisted for Microsoft for Startups Program in collaboration with Invest India — Government of India’s national investment promotion and facilitation agency, to support tech startups in the country.
We won the INC 42 — #PITCH42 challenge out of the nine finalists.
Winner of SIMBA QuickStart, Wyoming Hackathon
We were awarded the Most Innovative Blockchain or Crypto Product by the India FinTech Forum (IFTA)
We are a finalist in the ongoing CISCO Agri Challenge that has helped us with monetary rewards and even larger rewards in November 2021
We won the TADS awards that recognised our effort in tokenizing real-world assets, in December 2021
Finally, we closed the year by winning NASSCOM India Fintech Awards in the month of December 2021.
In a small timeframe, we built a strong Blockchain lending arm with a thriving ecosystem of warehouses, farmers and banks. As we’re learning more and more every day, building upon our technical expertise and industry presence, we’ve artfully formulated our roadmap to achieve our grand vision: DeFi for Everyone!
We’re focusing on the following aspects to help scale Brú.Finance in 2022:
These aspects in our journey will help us progress towards leveraging the power of DeFi to bring financial inclusion among people from different strata; farmers, small businesses, the migrants to name a few.
Our efforts also brought us significant coverage in several notable media outlets and conferences.
We’re so grateful for an eventful year where we powered through to get this far with Brú.Finance. We’re headed towards making DeFi accessible to anyone, anywhere without a hard-set dependency on cryptocurrencies to natively borrow and lend.
Ashish Anand — CEO & Co-founder, Brú.Finance, shares that in the last three years, Brú.Finance has already achieved customer satisfaction on multiple grounds.
“Our customer can range from a small or marginal farmer in India looking for post-harvest loans now to a wine cellar operator in Argentina looking for receivable finance against their exports,” stated Ashish.
Speaking on Brú’s core vision, Ashish adds that Bru’s vision stems from the core team’s desire to bring easy, real-time, and non-tech-savvy access to finance to a community of individual savers and asset owners across the globe in a borderless and bankless fashion.