This millennial took a wager during the pandemic. Now the startup he cofounded, VRRB Labs employees 8 web3 professionals

Indonesia’s counterfeit problem spurred a multi-million dollar beauty business

When the Covid pandemic was raging in 2020, much of the world was in lockdown and many more businesses were closing down.

But Sanjay Bandare did the unexpected: he decided to quit his comfortable day time job and co-found a startup in the midst of a pandemic and the worst economic crisis faced by his country Sri Lanka since its independence.

Sanjay’s blockchain startup, VRRB, had just two people, him and his co-founder Andrew Smith at the start of 2021. Fast forward to 2022, Sanjay and Andrew have been joined by their third co-founder Shiva Kintali, and their startup now employees 8 highly paid web3 engineers.

“A lot of people actually told us that it’s a very bold move to create a new blockchain in the current market, while most business were either laying off employees or closing down entirely [during the pandemic],” he added.

But that was a “well-calculated” move for VRRB.

We know that this is the time for us to actually prepare … to make sure that after the pandemic and recession, we have something that helps individuals secure their assets

Sanjay Bandare

Co-Founder and COO of VRRB Labs Inc

Looking far ahead turned out to be the right move for the 31-year-old and his co-founder Andrew. Through the pandemic, in the year 2021, Sanjay and Andrew spent their free time collaborating together online, working from two different ends of the world and building a fresh, new, faster and more secure consensus algorithm for a new layer 1 blockchain.

Since 2022, VRRB has raised an undisclosed amount in the millions, and drawn an impressive list of venture capital investors and partners.

Meeting his Co-Founder Online

The idea for VRRB came from Andrew Smith, whom Sanjay met through an online discussion forum for global entrepreneurs.

Sanjay instantly recognized the value in Andrew’s proposition and began discussing how VRRB could potentially push the world of blockchain…