We’re only in the second week of 2023, but demo days have already begun as founders try to keep momentum alive in the ever-changing crypto market.
Beacon, a web3-focused early-stage accelerator program, launched last year, and its flagship cohort just graduated. The teams in the first cohort, known as Cohort 0, presented their ideas on Tuesday during a demo day, exclusively covered by TechCrunch.
“For Cohort 0, we spoke with over 1,000 projects to end up at 15 companies in Cohort 0 with 13 graduating at our Demo Day,” Sandeep Nailwal, core contributor of Beacon and co-founder of Polygon, said to TechCrunch. “With the current rate of applications for Cohort 1, we’re planning to land at a similar 1% acceptance rate.”
The three-month program runs twice a year and accepts about 15 to 20 applicants for its fall and spring cohorts.
“We feel like Cohort 0 is our MVP of Beacon,” Nailwal said. “So for this cohort, we hand-picked our favorite teams through taking calls with founders sourced through our networks.”
Mentors include Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden; a handful of venture capitalists; Rob Behnke, co-founder of Halborn; Brendan Farmer, co-lead at Polygon Zero; Dan Kim, VP of business development and listing at Coinbase; and Miles Anthony, CEO and co-founder of Decentral Games, to name a few.
For the next cohort, there will be a standard $250,000 investment, with an $8 million post-money valuation from Beacon for each company in the program, Nailwal noted. In Cohort 0, investments were done on a case-by-case basis as the team was refining its process, he added.
Beacon is “chain-agnostic,” which means most of the teams in Cohort 0 were building cross-chain applications, Nailwal said. However, Ethereum topped the list for the most teams building on that blockchain. Of the 13 companies, there were 29 founders across nine countries and 13 cities, Kenzi Wang, core contributor at Beacon and co-founder of Symbolic Capital, said during the demo day.
The startups focused on a range of crypto subsectors, like gaming, infrastructure, decentralized lending and borrowing, and developer tooling, to name a few. Almost all of the startups in the cohort are seed stage, with the exception of one company, Community Gaming, at Series A.
Here are the details behind Cohort 0’s 13 startups:
Company name: Arcana
Company name: Blinkmoon
Company name: ChapterX
Company name: Colexion
Company name: Community Gaming
Company name: Cubist
Company name: FastLane
Company name: Meta Apes
Company name: Mystic Moose
Company name: Nillion
Company name: Davos Protocol
Company name: Timeswap
Company name: Ylide
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