TripWorld’s founding vision is to deliver savings, speed and simplicity to the travel experience, starting with a better tourist tax refund (VAT/GST) solution called “TripTax”.
Tourist-tax refunds (VAT/GST) are time-consuming due to long queues and paperwork, involve expensive FX transactions and are subject to high commission (up to 43% by market leaders!).
TripTax empowers merchants (tax agents) and tourists to handle the tax refund digitally and without the need to queue at the airport.
To realize this vision, TripWorld sought a technical co-founder to challenge, design and implement TripTax and support with architecting its startup roadmap.
Project Highlights
- TripTax’ technology enables a workflow where the initial tax receipt and purchase is securely digitized, an untampered proof of repatriation of the purchase is obtained and the refund can be processed by the government.
- To achieve this, we use state-of-the-art AI object recognition technology in partnership with university researchers in Europe and store the transactions on a permissioned blockchain, R3 Corda.
- Slash is taking on a role as the tech lead from beginning to end. As one of the main shareholders, Slash also sits on the board and supports defining the business roadmap (strategy and go-to-market, financial plan, team).
- As a result of very long sales cycles to obtain government tax licenses and the unexpected turmoil brought by COVID-19, Slash has also supported TripTax with designing stop-gap monetization solutions. This includes an email add-on that monetises your inbox by adding non-intrusive adverts below each email, without storing customer data, and automatically allows you to plant trees for emails received.
- The backend is built on NodeJS, mobile app on React Native, and infrastructure on AWS and R3 Corda. The AI algorithms in Python.