How 3D Asset Protection Startup Polyport’s Rebrand and Simplified Pitch Led to Success at SXSW

For the second year in a row, digital asset encryption startup Polyport landed a win at SXSW, this time in the accelerator pitch competition in the Security and Privacy Technology category. The startup’s journey to focusing their pitch for their complex product was a long one, but now with a new rebrand, the team is moving full speed ahead towards raising a seed round and scaling their team.

“We’ve come an extremely long way since last year,” says CEO Chloe Kettell. “We’re glad to be able to leverage that win at SXSW as another point of validation for us to help us raise those funds.”

Originally named D3CRYPT3D, the startup uses proprietary encryption technology to facilitate an end-to-end solution for 3D designers and protect the assets they’ve created. The platform tracks who, what, when, where and why when a file is shared. It also controls these factors in real-time and prevents anyone from stealing the underlying IP.

Polyport is in a relatively new industry and after internal discussions, they found that their former name and branding was too difficult to understand and spell.

“Upon starting our Colorado-based accelerator in January, we realized that our name was very difficult to spell and it didn’t best represent our product,” says Kettell. “Polyport means ‘Poly’ representing polygons and ‘Port’ meaning all of the assets are being passed back and forth through Polyport. It’s more user-friendly.”

Kettell shared that learning the best way to get their message and complex product across in layman’s terms was the biggest challenge in perfecting Polyport’s pitch.

As Kettell told Hype last year, “they’re creating something that hasn’t existed yet — answering and addressing problems. As for the industry and funding we are doing just that, dealing with the challenges as they come in.”

“Since the last release of our software, we’ve made several leaps in the architecture of how we’re going to secure the whole experience to make it a multi-level security technology, thanks to participating in the Colorado cybersecurity accelerator,” says co-founder and CTO Partha Ray. “This is what’s driving the timeline for us.”

The startup has also moved away from their initial push for an outside approach through plug-ins, wrapping all of the different software programs together. “We’re elevating the product while maintaining the core features,” says Kettell.

Along with ongoing efforts to complete their seed round of $850,000, Polyport is focusing on adding security layers to their platform and kicking off their beta testing.

“We’re now going through a major redesign since the first iteration looked a bit homegrown,” says Kettell. “We’re still going through some mock-ups, but our product roadmap is doing an internal beta release in May and in August, doing our private beta release.”

“We’re going to full capital raising mode to reach these internal goals and hire more developers for infrastructure and automation testing as well as a smart marketing lead to promote our upcoming private beta.”