Read the full case study here.
When Indicio, a Public Benefit Corporation focused on decentralized identity solutions, launched in March 2020, the timing couldn't have been more challenging. The newly formed team, veterans of the decentralized identity and verifiable credentials space, unexpectedly found themselves building a startup in complete isolation, operating 100% remotely from day one.
But the pandemic wasn't their only challenge. Like all startups, Indicio faced a fundamental question: How do you prove you're enterprise-ready when you're brand new?
"We were going after governments and enterprises with real business use cases," explains Helen Garneau, CMO of Indicio. "We wanted to help them streamline operations, prevent fraud, and elevate user experiences. But as a startup, how do you walk into those conversations with credibility on day one?"
The founding team chose to focus on community leadership rather than traditional marketing. Indicio built its flagship offering, Indicio Proven, directly on technologies openly developed by LF Decentralized Trust and, in some cases, now OpenWallet Foundation communities, including Aries Framework, ACA-Py, Credo, Hyperledger AnonCreds, Hyperledger Indy, and Trust Over IP.
Indicio committed to actively contributing back to these projects and leading within the community. These weren't theoretical contributions. Indicio builds and deploys solutions for customers' toughest challenges. Its contributed code delivers proven customer value in production environments: practical solutions that work at scale, not academic concepts.
This decision set the stage for what Indicio calls their "open source flywheel"—a self-reinforcing cycle of participation, contribution, visibility, growth, and reinvestment. It would prove to be a far more capital-efficient path than traditional marketing could ever provide.
The open source flywheel created five earned advantages: instant credibility, premium speaking opportunities, global market access, early market intelligence, and partnership magnetism.
Through this approach, Indicio deployed solutions across multiple continents, including Aruba, Kansas, Japan, and Europe, and secured partnerships with NEC, SITA, Dai Nippon Printing, Nippon RAD, AWS, Google Cloud, and Thales.
"Open source gave our company visibility at an early stage," reflects Garneau. "The ecosystem gave us that credibility. That participation, those contributions, and then the deployments gave us our growth."
The Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust team worked with Indicio on a case study detailing the business strategy, technical contributions, and global deployments that enabled the company to scale rapidly. It delves into how open source leadership creates credibility, market access, and partnership opportunities.
Read the full case study here.
