Travel technology provider Simard, launched to provide corporate travel solutions based on the Winding Tree blockchain travel marketplace, is being "wound down" and "withdrawn," CEO Don Birch confirmed to BTN portfolio mate The Beat.
Simard was launched in 2021 by Winding Tree founder Pedro Renaud Anderson and travel technology consultant Matthieu Tahon to develop corporate use cases built from the Winding Tree blockchain. Among its announced projects included work with Atriis and NuTravel, now Traverse Technologies, to work with its Smart Contracts product.
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However, Birch said in his message to The Beat that "over the past 18 months, we have been unable to raise the additional funding that would have enabled Simard to begin to scale."
Birch added that the Simard team had hopes that other innovators would continue the work that the company had been doing.
"All the elements needed to create an open marketplace have now been made available through Open Source," Birch said in the message. "We fully expect others to pick up the baton and use this Open Source platform to take the concept to the next stage. Such is the nature of innovation."
*This story originally appeared in Business Travel News, a fellow Northstar Travel Group publication.