Startup of the Day: WhiteBridge, a Lithuanian platform specializing in personal insights

Founded in December 2023 by Tomas Martunas, Irmantas Motiejūnas, Justin Barauskas, and Paulius Taraškevičius, WhiteBridge develops a digital platform specializing in deep personal insights to empower sales strategies. The platform provides behavioral and career analysis, search results analysis, data privacy analysis, and reverse face search analysis. WhiteBridge claims, it wants to change the way in which people communicate with one another and manage their online reputation

In the Startup of the Day column, the founding team of WhiteBridge, shares the details about the startup’s idea, its product, and their future plans.

The Startup of the Day column on AIN is dedicated to tech projects from all sectors that originate from the CEE countries. If you would like to introduce your project, please fill in the questionnaire.

Tell us about your startup. How does it work?

WhiteBridge wants to change the way in which people communicate with one another and manage their online reputations. We do that by leveraging AI tech and data about people to identify the most effective style of communication with them.

Whitebridge’s foundation is a decentralized infrastructure for collecting, verifying, and providing insights on personal data. More specifically, we have developedAI-Empowered dapps, which position us as the leading solution provider for webutation (web reputation) management, sales preparation, recruitment, and personal cybersecurity insights,

WhiteBridge integrates data from more than 30 sources (and growing) to create unified, comprehensive profiles of individuals. We are capable of delivering not just raw data, but actionable insights that empower users in various professional and personal scenarios.

How did you come up with the startup’s idea? What was the reason/motivation behind it?

WhiteBridge was born out of a recognition of people data as the most valuable asset of the 21st century. Sales people, recruiters, influencers and many more groups will benefit from better knowledge about their prospects, candidates, and personal reputations, and have more meaningful conversations as a result.

All in all, we are motivated by a vision of the empowerment of social relationships. Despite living in a digital age, relationships are still the most important thing there is. In addition, we believe everyone should have the right to understand what their online image looks like and be able to make informed decisions about it.

We’re also big on privacy and will be looking to offer services to make the most of legislation like GDPR, allowing us to empower individuals to remove information about them online without needing to go through the process manually with each individual data officer at each company that holds information about you.

On the technical side, we saw a gap in the market to efficiently consolidate and interpret what we consider ‘dispersed’ digital identities. Meaning that every person has pieces of their identity across multiple platforms, like different social media, but we don’t have good awareness of what they look like together.

How long did it take to reach the prototype or MVP? What did you encounter?

Initially, we focused only on insights for sales. However, we quickly understood that we had stumbled upon an idea with the potential to serve a wide range of needs. So we decided that we needed to test different approaches and conduct deeper interviews with potential customers. As a result, we ended up expanding the use cases. However, ultimately we see ourselves very much creating a data layer that is able to generate actionable insights for a multitude of purposes.

When exactly did you launch your product? Or when the launch is planned?

We made an announcement about our online platform in December 2023. That was another way of testing our offer, rather than a super formal launch. We are proceeding in true startup fashion, testing and iterating at every step of the way.

Tell us about the startup’s business model. How do you monetize your product?

Now, we operate a subscription-based model. There are different tiers to accommodate the needs of various groups, from individual consumers to enterprise clients. We also have a low-cost entry point for individuals to try out the service at just $9.99.

What are your target markets and consumers?

We are targeting both B2C and B2B. Like we mentioned before, we are first catering to individuals with a special interest in their online reputation, such as professionals who network a lot, influencers, and others. And of course, there are the sales and recruitment industries.

In terms of geographies, we don’t have a restriction, however the sweet spot will be English speaking countries, where you find a lot of our target customers and where the market size has the most potential. So, the US is a big target for us.

If the startup has already launched the product, what are the results: metrics, income, or any clear indicators that can be evaluated.

We have actually already attracted hundreds of customers and generated thousands of leads. There is strong interest from the market. We have collaborated with some influencers and are experimenting with digital marketing with early successes. However, it’s still very early days.

What about your team? How many people are working in the startup? If you’re looking for new employees, indicate whom exactly.

Our team consists of the four founders and six hired specialists. We have senior developers, data scientists, and marketing experts. Additionally, we believe in the benefits of strong networks. For us, our partners are like an extension of our team.

We are looking for people that share a common vision, especially people who have practical knowledge in open-source intelligence, data engineering & person recognition fields.

Have you already raised any investments? Provide us with more details on each funding round: the amount, investors, the purpose of the investment.

WhiteBridge is currently keeping our options open. We are participating in local acceleration programs and the founding team has deep roots in Lithuania’s top startups, meaning we are well-networked into investment channels. Having said that, we are always open to new conversations.

What’s next? Tell us about your future plans.

We’ll continue testing and iterating, introducing new features, improving the user experience, and focusing on making the insights even more actionable. All the while expanding our sales and continuing to experiment with marketing. We’ll be putting more of an emphasis on our sales capabilities for the sales and recruitment use cases.

Finally, we are looking to evolve into a community-driven product, and evaluating the best possible routes there. From integrating feedback tools directly into our reports to testing governance tools offered by the rising blockchain market. We see a lot of potential to enable user control and incentivize data improvement.