Bindle

Carlos Corten and his team of six co-founders began exploring digital identity and photography technology back in 2018, long before the pandemic made credentials a urgent concern. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, they recognized an immediate market need: a better way to verify health credentials at scale. The idea wasn't to replace the paper vaccine card—that would never work—but to create a "fast lane" for digital verification, similar to TSA PreCheck at airports. They founded the company in June 2020 and shipped their first release just two months later in August 2020.

Bindle's technology leverages blockchain and non-fungible tokens to turn health credentials into cryptographic assets that users carry on their phones. The innovation lies in their "rules engine," which scans a user's wallet for tokens matching specific criteria (e.g., "vaccinated in last 90 days") and generates a zero-knowledge proof—a cryptographic entry pass that proves compliance without actually revealing any medical data. This solved a critical privacy problem: venues could verify compliance without accessing sensitive health information. The six co-founders split equity evenly and brought perpendicular skills to the table. By October 2020, they had grown their team to 15 full-time employees and were talking to NFL, NBA, and MLB teams about implementation.

Bindle's go-to-market strategy focused on direct enterprise sales to venues, employers, and event organizers who faced the operational burden of verifying thousands of credentials. They positioned their solution for high-volume scenarios—stadium entries, large public events, and corporate return-to-work programs. They secured 200 active paying customers by October 2020, though most were small-scale users doing light scanning. The pricing model emerged through experimentation: they settled on 10 cents per scan, significantly lower than industry benchmarks of $5 per seat, believing volume would drive profitability at scale.

The core technology resonated with security-conscious organizers, particularly for smaller private events like weddings where attendees wanted assurance of safety protocols. However, major venues like FedEx Field proved reluctant to mandate app adoption—the friction was too high and the perceived risk of alienating customers (especially non-tech-savvy attendees) was real. The bigger challenge was go-to-market: convincing large venues to announce that customers must download an app and carry a digital wallet created operational and PR risks that most weren't willing to take. Instead of displacement, Bindle had to position itself as a voluntary fast-track option alongside traditional verification methods. By late 2020, they were doing approximately 4,000 scans monthly across their 200 customer base, translating to roughly $400-500 in monthly revenue. Carlos noted they were "still discovering the revenue model" and that pricing would "continue to reveal itself" as they learned utilization rates at different venue types.

With 100,000 wallets installed across 30 US states and 2-3 Canadian provinces, Bindle operates as a pre-Series A company still raising seed capital through angel investors (typically $50k-$100k checks). The team of 15 includes engineers focused on blockchain infrastructure, design, and product. Future roadmap expansions include digital ticketing, academic records, and voter registration on the same underlying tokenization rails—essentially building a generalized digital identity platform beyond pandemic credentials. They're competing against well-capitalized players like Clear (which went public in summer 2021) and IBM (the state of New York's vendor). The burn rate is high for the company's maturity, but Carlos believes they're "punching above their weight class" relative to competitors. The long-term thesis: tokenizing data on decentralized networks will drive "the next decade worth of growth."