Meet Amir Kaltak: the entrepreneur who has created a marketplace for intellectual property.
Amir Kaltak is a product of the 90’s, the decade in which he began his business career. His first company was in the rapidly changing music production industry at a time when analogue suddenly began to be replaced by digital.
The immediacy of technology change and the benefits that rapid adoption can bring seems to have made an impression on Amir’s entrepreneur journey.
Kaltak is not an entrepreneur afraid to jump on paradigm changing ideas and his latest venture LEXIT is proof of that. It uses blockchain technology to rapidly complete transactions of companies, assets, and intellectual property and seeks to connect sellers and buyers on a searchable marketplace.
He believes that this provides a safer and far less expensive way for businesses to liquidise assets or acquire parts of companies. Transaction volumes are recorded on tamper-proof smart contracts, which means that they are totally transparent and secure.
Amir can trace the origins of LEXIT through his twenty or so years in the world of startups from his experiences of exiting companies and trying to maximise funds for the next one. The idea was formed from frustration at the difficulty startup owners have in finding buyers for their intellectual property.
“I started my first adventure in my early twenties; I graduated and immediately went to incorporate a business, in Germany. I was asked what kind of business it was going to be and I said that I didn’t know, I’ll just figure it out on the way.
“A short while after that I started a music production company, so I was taking gigs from radio stations and TV stations.”
But the 90s saw drastic change in music production with the move to the digital domain: it became possible to record audio directly on to a computer and edit on there.
“This was the ultimate new thing. I started a venture and developed plugins and software tools to use on workstations to improve the sound. I developed a UX – I was coding at the time – and it was good. We sold packages that were… not cheap — it was like my first real IT startup and I came out of it with some funds after we sold the business.”
It was in 2013 that Amir moved to Finland and started Nintu, a matchmaking app for activities that planned to help users find like minded people who wanted to do the same things. Although this venture failed, it would lead him to find the people who would become co-founders of LEXIT.
“Co-founder [of LEXIT] Maija was involved in Nintu already, and then the other co-founder Dennis joined the team and we started doing this EnvyMe thing for a while, until we realised that Estonia is a pretty great hub. It is much cheaper in operations than Finland so basically your runtime is doubling for the same funding.”
The idea for LEXIT came when Amir decided to sell IP he owned from a previous startup in order to raise much-needed funds. The difficulties in locating a buyer raised in his eyes the question of why there was no online marketplace for tech assets.
With the upcoming launch of the LEXIT token for the platform – sales start on June 19 and will run until July 25 at 11:59 UTC – Amir is working fully to prepare his team for the mission ahead.
“You need a great idea and greater execution skills. What is a company? It’s the people in the company. You need to surround yourself with people who you think are smarter than you and empower your surroundings. Ultimately alone, you aren’t going far,” he finished.
Empowering others is all part of LEXIT’s mission, too. The marketplace hopes to hand the power to businesses looking to acquire assets or IP from each other without being charged numerous fees and involving themselves with corporate lawyers. A successful launch could see massive improvement in the transparency, cost, and speed of mergers and acquisitions.
