Beacon, the web3 startup accelerator founded by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, has grown by adding ten new startups in its third cohort.
According to Beacon, today was the demo day for the graduating startups, and the founders made their pitches to potential investors. This is the startup accelerator’s third batch since it began operations in January 2023. It holds two sessions a year.
“This marks the one-year anniversary of Beacon,” Nailwal said. “We’ve accelerated 33 startups, grown our investor network to over 500, and our companies have raised more than $150 million collectively.”
Beacon provides coaching and funding to early-stage startups as a part of Nailwal’s cryptocurrency venture capital firm, Symbolic Capital.
Mentors include SoftBank director Neil Cunha-Gomes, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, Paul Veradittakit, managing partner of Pantera Capital, and Coinbase vice president of business development Dan Kim.
Beacon was established with the aim of creating the next 100 Web3 unicorns. Nailwal expects that multiple unicorns will emerge from the latest 10 startups in the third cohort.
The latest cohort comprises ten startups:
- Range Protocol, a DeFi asset management protocol;
- Fraction AI, a decentralized human-powered data labeling platform for training AI models;
- Zero Gravity, a web3 modular infrastructure developer;
- Sending Labs, a web3 communications platform;
- Mizu, a crypto payments platform;
- Maru, a blockchain scaling infrastructure developer;
- Moso, a crypto rewards provider;
- Fluent, an Ethereum Layer 2 developer;
- Inco Network, a Layer 1 blockchain developer; and
- HyperOracle, which seeks to rethink smart contracts for blockchains driven by AI.
Beacon is getting ready to introduce its fourth cohort, S24, shortly after these startups have graduated. Sam Lehman, a principal at Symbolic Capital and a key contributor at Beacon, announced that applications for S24 will open soon and be open for about two months.
Lehman stated, “Then we’ll spend a couple of months doing our interviews, selecting the new cohort, and aiming for the program to commence from May and extend into late August.”
Beacon receives over 1,000 applications for its cohorts, and after various rounds of interviews, the accelerator selects 10 to 20 startups for each cohort.
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