Never Lose Your Records Again

The idea behind TransCrypts, a blockchain startup co-founded in 2020 by Zain Zaidi and Ali Zaheer (BA 2021 UTSC), began with a familiar frustration: proving that you’ve earned the credentials you worked so hard to obtain.

Zaidi ran into this dilemma while applying for a graduate program at Harvard. With a deadline looming, he learned the university hadn’t received his undergraduate transcript and diploma – paper documents sent by mail.

“I did everything right, and Harvard’s coming back to me and saying they never received them,” he recalls. “They didn’t have anything to prove I went to school.” That’s when he and Zaheer saw an opportunity. Why, in a digital era, were academic records still largely paper based and moving at the speed of mail?

Their solution was TransCrypts – a platform that stores credentials on blockchain, a technology known for enabling cryptocurrency transactions. Documents recorded on blockchain cannot be altered but they can be securely shared through a link or a QR code – making them portable and tamper-proof.

The founders, who developed their idea at U of T Scarborough’s entrepreneurship incubator, believed the technology could be put to work in applications beyond education, from reference requests to credit checks – and potentially medical records, where, they say, two corporate players hold a near-monopoly on a fragmented, inaccessible system.

After launching TransCrypts, Zaidi and Zaheer raised seed funding and expanded to Silicon Valley before relocating back to Toronto, drawn by the city’s talent pool. The firm now has 18 employees, mostly in Canada.

About 650 corporate clients currently use the technology for verification tasks such as background checks, references and credit checks. “If you’re an employer with more than 1,000 employees, you’re dealing with dozens of these requests every week,” says Zaidi. “It is easier and more compliant to give employees access to their verified credentials so that they can handle them directly.”

When refugees began fleeing the Ukraine war without access to vital health information, TransCrypts found an unexpected humanitarian use. The company began working with Ukrainian non-profits to provide its software free of charge. Hospitals used the platform to store patient records on a secure blockchain, allowing those documents to be accessed outside the country and shared with new care providers.

“If I am a refugee in Germany and getting surgery, doctors have to contact a hospital in a war zone to get my information,” says Zaidi. “They may not respond in time. That hospital might have been destroyed.”

Over the last three years, the company has helped 100,000 refugees share their records, says Zaidi. “And hopefully, we saved some lives in the process.”