The company Rentadrone, of the Venezuelan in Chile Julio Rejón, is the only Chilean company that won a crypto investment fund from Unicef. Latin American companies from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay also won.
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Rentadrone a company created by a Venezuelan engineer in Chile, Julio Rejon, has just been one of the winners of the crypto fund, Unicef Venture Fund that the United Nations Children’s Fund awards to companies related to emerging technologies. It is the only one in Chile and one of 8 in Latin America.
CryptoFund de Unicef seeks to boost the use of cryptocurrencies, specifically Ethereum a decentralized open-source blockchain with smart contracts functionality. y Bitcoin the biggest and most popular cryptocurrency in the world. It is a decentralized digital currency that enables users to make trustless peer-to-peer transactions. , as an investment vehicle in startups in early and middle stages, in developing countries.
Rejon spoke with DiarioBitcoin and explained the impact such a cryptocurrency cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that use cryptographic technologies to secure their operation. fund means for his company.
In principle, he says that Rentadrone is an engineering company, which develops automatic fault detection technology through images taken with drones. It has two main services: one for agriculture, which is called AI Agro, which is to detect diseases in plants; and the other one is calledThermal Maps which is used to detect faults in solar panels in solar photovoltaic power generation plants.
The usefulness of the crypto fund
Explica: “We’re going to use the fund to continue to expand the capabilities of our online platform, looking to become an online asset management platform. That is, where you can report issues, manage repairs, fumigations, panel washes, whatever it is for both industries that we’re in right now.”
Añade: “ This means that Rentadrone’s online platform a place to buy, sell and store cryptocurrency will have the ability to increase the traceability of changes, repairs and warranty claims that may have the equipment used by large energy companies”.
He points out that his company was selected by Unicef, among other reasons, because it is open source: “The fact that our development is open source means that anyone who wants to have an enterprise similar to mine can start using my code. And the second reason, which is equally important, is that our technological developments are aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations”.
Crypto to attract international talent
He adds that they decided to participate in the CryptoFund “because it gives us the ability to hire people outside more easily by offering payments in cryptocurrencies. Many times we need scientific personnel trained in image recognition or machine learning and it is difficult to get in Latin America”.
That is, cryptocurrencies in this case turn out to be the best method of payment for such foreign staff. That’s why Rejón insists that the great advantage of having crypto “is the opportunity to be able to locate funds anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes and to be able to recruit staff anywhere without having to go through excessive paperwork to execute payments.”
Rejon already had a relationship with cryptocurrencies and had even had investments in them.
This 30-year-old professional was born in Caracas, where he studied Political Science. He migrated to Santiago de Chile where he studied at the AIEP Professional Institute and graduated as an engineer. He founded Rentadrone in 2017, of which he is also CEO.
El fondo Unicef
UNICEF Venture Fund is a pooled fund of USD $35 million + 2527 ethers + 8 bitcoins. The first financial vehicle of its kind at the United Nations, it invests in “early-stage, open source, emerging technologies with the potential to impact children on a global scale.” The Fund makes capital-free investments exclusively in startups for-profit companies registered in emerging economies.
Among the Latin American winners of this fund are Augmentative Communication (Argentina) that developed the OTTAA Project, an AI-powered alternative and augmentative communication assistant for children with speech impairments to communicate their basic needs and express their feelings. They are also Bioverse Labs (Brazil), Weni (Brazil), Dronfies Labs (Uruguay), Atix Labs (Argentina), Dymaxion Labs (Argentina), Pixframe (Mexico).
Interview to Julio Rejón made by MRTabuas/ DiarioBitcoin
With additional information from Unicef
Image by Julio Rejón