Success Story
TripWorld's founding vision is to deliver savings, speed and simplicity to the travel experience, starting with a better tourist tax refund (VAT/GST) solution called “TripTax”. Tourist-tax refunds (VAT/GST) are time-consuming due to long queues and paperwork, involve expensive FX transactions and are subject to high commission (up to 43% by market leaders!).
TripTax empowers merchants (tax agents) and tourists to handle the tax refund digitally and without the need to queue at the airport. To realize this vision, TripWorld sought a technical co-founder to challenge, design and implement TripTax and support with architecting its startup roadmap.
TripTax’ technology enables a workflow where the initial tax receipt and purchase is securely digitized, an untampered proof of repatriation of the purchase is obtained and the refund can be processed by the government.
To achieve this, we use state-of-the-art AI object recognition technology in partnership with university researchers in Europe and store the transactions on a permissioned blockchain, R3 Corda.
Slash is taking on a role as the tech lead from beginning to end. As one of the main shareholders, Slash also sits on the board and supports defining the business roadmap (strategy and go-to-market, financial plan,, team).
As a result of very long sales cycles to obtain government tax licenses and the unexpected turmoil brought by COVID-19, Slash has also supported TripTax with designing stop-gap monetization solutions. This includes an email add-on that monetises your inbox by adding non-intrusive adverts below each email, without storing customer data, and automatically allows you to plant trees for emails received.
The backend is built on NodeJS, mobile app on React Native, and infrastructure on AWS and R3 Corda. The AI algorithms in Python.
Clik provides a unified platform for all payments in emerging markets in ASEAN, starting in Cambodia. It offers merchants and consumers a seamless payment experience online and offline, and helps merchants with data-driven tools for micro-targeting, loyalty cash-back schemes and credit. Clik is run by seasoned global banking and hedge fund professionals looking to bring state-of-the-art contactless payment and loyalty technology to help merchants in emerging markets. Its core payment technology is supported by strategic global partners such as OpenWay and MyPINPAD, and includes secure multi-factor authentication for unsecured touchscreen devices, payment aggregation, mobile POS (mPOS) and contactless SoftPOS.
IMD Business School (IMD) is one of the world’s leading business schools. IMD specializes in executive education, including MBA and Executive MBA programs, and delivers this through one integrated multidisciplinary faculty on campus in Switzerland or at the client sites.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) established ADB Ventures early 2020, a new venture platform that aims to become Asia’s leading impact technology platform, crowding over $1 billion of risk capital to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Asia is brimming with technology solutions to conserve energy, reduce waste, fight climate change, and deliver public services effectively. ADB will help bring these solutions to market by leveraging their extensive operational networks and filling the risk capital gap facing innovative early-stage companies in developing Asia and the Pacific, particularly smaller and frontier markets.