The Blockchain Accelerator Startfleet Opens New Application Window
The second season of blockchain accelerator Startfleet is coming and seed stage companies that want to develop applications on the blockchain 3.0 platform of æternity are welcome until February 17. Startfleet aims to find up five or six startups and offers investments of up to $100K. Even though the program and the team are based in Sofia, it’s open for applications worldwide.
Startfleet is part of æternity Ventures, the direct investment vehicle of the headquartered in Lichtenstein blockchain company æternity that raised $35М through kind of donation campaign during the ICO storm in 2017. Last year the venture arm invested over $1M in 12 projects.
Long-term incubation
The focus areas of the Startfleet’s second season are green energy, insurance, data market, exchanges, trade and games. Companies in the seed stage that are developing their business model, go-to-market strategy and have an MVP are the target of this edition.
“Our goal is to preselect ten startups that will go through a one-week long preparation program. We’ll select up to six of them to continue in the accelerator and get funding”, Elisaveta Georgieva of æternity Ventures, explained Trending Topics. According to her, only in the region there are hundreds of blockchain projects, waiting to be discovered and supported.
The chosen teams would go through a one-month long online acceleration program in March and April and receive investment offers after this. Unlike the first season of Startfleet when the investments’ limit was $250K, this time startups could get up to $100K in AE tokens or services. æternity Ventures will continue supporting the development of their projects on one-on-one basis in the next six months.
Тhree of the eight companies from the Startfleet 2018 batch were from Bulgaria – Tradex Social, weiDex and Noble.
The bigger vision
The whole acceleration program is part of æternity’s strategy to catalyze an ecosystem of applications for its blockchain platform. Since the company raised $35М in 2017, it has been focused on developing a secure infrastructure that would allow diverse decentralized applications to be built on it.
Even though æternity has also an internal application development unit and several products in the pipeline, the company is looking to involve a larger community in the development process. This is also the reason for the establishment of the investment vehicle æternity Ventures and the recently announced foundations in Bulgaria and Lichtenstein that will provide grants and education for R&D of blockchain projects. The Bulgarian foundation focuses on supporting projects throughout the Balkans, while the Liechtenstein-based foundation has an international focus. The foundations are also aiming to work closely with academia and educational institutions.
