Meet Maria Lema, co-founder of Weaver Labs
I’m Maria Lema, co-founder of Weaver Labs.
What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal?
It started off when I was leading the 5G Tactile Internet Lab at King’s College London, which gave me the opportunity to work with great professionals and cutting edge technologies. Our goal was to understand why 5G was needed and which industries were going to benefit the most.
During that journey I met my co-founders, who introduced me to the concept of Blockchain and Web3 - we thought telecoms and decentralisation together would make a lot of sense, since the industry was opening up and evolving from something very monolithic to something open and integrable. With this outlook, we set about forming Weaver Labs.
Weaver Labs’ end goal is to create an open, public and decentralised network that serves as the engine of a marketplace of connectivity assets. This open, public network creates a complete decoupling of infrastructure ownership and service provisioning, breaks silos of networks and knits together existing telecoms assets. Our product is Cell-Stack, a software platform that digitises telecoms infrastructure assets and offers them “as-a-service” in the marketplace. Anything from a lamp-post and a fibre network to an entire wireless infrastructure is aggregated in a pool of resources that is offered in a Network-as-a-Service portal.
What keeps you motivated as an entrepreneur when you hit bumps in the road?
The team. We’ve had difficult times (as any founding team would have!) but we’re all determined to work together - we all understand there’s nothing else we want to be part of.
Being part of a founding team that is driven, and motivated to make an impact in Web3, is the key incentive for all of us. It makes it easier to overcome difficult moments and challenges when you are part of a team that is united and willing to confront things head on.
What does your business offer its target audience?
With 5G being deployed, and the great innovations happening in the context of smart cities, manufacturing, automotive etc, there is a huge burden placed on service providers to invest in networks to provide the level of connectivity needed to support all these new services. We seek to incentivise new players to invest in infrastructure by creating a shared pool of resources that can be offered as-a-service to meet the demand of connectivity.
Weaver Labs’ marketplace of connectivity assets allows service providers to sell network services (5G/4G, Satellite, IoT) over a shared infrastructure model. The infrastructure is owned by one or multiple players (neutral hosts, local authorities, other service providers). This concept is mainly driven by open architectures and software integration of networks. It also allows verticals, public sector (cities) and new connectivity users to scale fast using Weaver Labs’ stack to build hyper-scalable networks.
How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
We offer an open and shared marketplace where assets of both public and private sectors are digitised, shared and accessed.
Our key differentiators are:
Digitisation of telecoms assets: creation of digital profiles of all telecoms assets and to commercialise with the use of smart contracts
Value creation through ecosystem partnerships: customers receive greater benefits if they belong to a large pool of participants
Zero Trust cybersecurity design, automated monitoring and compliance driven: customers can very easily visualise the security of the network and act fast
What plans do you have for Weaver Labs over the next two years?
We plan to transition to a fully decentralised network using Cell-Stack, namely Cell-Network. We’re moving from distributed to decentral by building the Web3 protocol layer on top of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network (where all nodes are equal and act as both “servers” and “clients”, sharing resources). This will enable the decentralised network-as-a-service business model, based on tokenised economies. A blockchain layer will take on the role of governance of the decentralised marketplace, and the token is the currency used in the ecosystem of Cell-Network.
We do all this by working with the Telecoms sector - continued adoption is key. Since the very beginning at Weaver Labs we have been working with all our stakeholders and refining the requirements and features of Cell-Stack to make sure we’re meeting and converting the market’s needs. We plan to do the same as we move into blockchain, launching our token and the NFT (non-fungible token) platform.
Tell us about your journey into this market.
We believed that there was a space for Weaver Labs to impact the industry and help break the silos that exist in telecoms. We arrived at the right time. Since our launch, the UK Government has introduced a number of strategies to test the impact of 5G and telecoms investment business models, help tackle diversification in the telecoms supply chain and increase pace of infrastructure roll-out. Our product is aligned with government priorities and we hope that our involvement in the market will continue to increase.
An integral element to this journey has been developing our relationships with customers and collaborating with other organisations and companies to achieve these goals. We have been working closely with both the private and public sector to build these relationships, test our product and execute our solutions.
Why do you think your business has had such a positive impact across your industry?
To put it simply, Cell-Stack solves a problem that exists in the telecoms sector. Networks need to be integrated, and new players must be incentivised to invest in infrastructure. Our innovative software may be technical, but is designed to make it easy for our target audiences to share and manage infrastructure assets that are required to deploy networks. Given that we are creating something unique, we hope that the positive impact we are making can continue to increase and expand.
Furthermore, as cloud and open networks continue to be more prevalent, cybersecurity is essential and must evolve. Weaver Labs’ Zero Trust approach - which adopts a ‘don’t trust anyone’ mentality - and product is secure-by-design and offers the means to achieve this. As Open Standards and Open Interfaces become a reality in mobile networks, interoperability will become the new standard. With these changes will come a more diversified supply chain, and, consequently, this Zero Trust approach will become even more important.
What advice would you give to early-stage founders wanting to harness the power of technology to create a positive impact?
Focus on your purpose, that is your long term goal. Always watch out for disruptive forces that might kill or explosively grow your business. Sometimes investors will ask for your business to be incremental, instead of tackling a big innovation, because it reduces their risks - so stay focussed on that purpose and be determined. If you know your industry and your product, you’re most likely going to create a positive impact.
Also, discipline and determination: persevere and keep fighting to succeed. There will be plenty of challenges, but also plenty of ups.
Why blockchain technology?
If we seek to move from a service-level agreement (SLA) pricing model to a pay-as-you-consume pricing model, we need ways to verify the resources that are being contributed to the network and those that are being consumed. Blockchain is a shared governance layer that provides that source of truth to the network, without having a centralised party verifying the network. We don’t want Weaver Labs to host the marketplace, but for it to be decentralised using Cell-Network.
In the decentralised marketplace, the blockchain layer coordinates trust among all the different players of the network, and plays an important role in: maintaining the rules of the market, brokering the network deals with bidding and pricing, maintaining the metering of the network services for each peer and upholding the reputation of all network participants.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will impact your industry over the next 10 years?
Weaver Labs wants to create and establish a global blockchain network to decentralise access to connectivity by reducing barriers to entry to new players in the telecoms sector. Weaver Labs would have contributed to change the supply chain dynamics, and removed barriers to infrastructure investment where the demand is met and there is a viable ROI to innovate and invest in new technologies.
Describe your business in three words.
Open, Decentralised, Secure-by-Design.
