Beacon, a Web 3.0-oriented early-stage accelerator has concluded its first cohort and has successfully graduated 13 companies that participated in the program.
Additionally, Beacon has made a venue available where project founders from the first cohort, that is, Cohort 0 can create a demo of their blockchain-based startups. Cohort 0 founders presented their ideas on Tuesday during the flagship demo day.
This Web3.0 accelerator program was launched last year with its first cohort kicking off in October 2022. The 12 weeks program enjoined participation from 15 companies from across Decentralized Finance (DeFi), gaming and infrastructure. However, only 13 companies completed the program, graduated, and got to participate in the demo day.
Amongst these companies are Arcana, Blinkmoon, ChapterX, Colexion, Community Gaming, Cubist, FastLane, Meta Apes, Mystic Moose, Nillion, Davos Protocol, TimeSwap, and Ylide. All these companies were described by Polygon co-founder and Beacon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal as the ‘MVP of Beacon’ citing the fact that they were the introductory batch that launched Beacon’s chain-agnostic utility.
“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. With the current rate of applications for Cohort 1, we’re planning to land at a similar 1% acceptance rate,” Nailwal announced “We feel like Cohort 0 is our MVP of Beacon. So for this cohort, we hand-picked our favorite teams through taking calls with founders sourced through our networks.”
Beacon Prepares For Cohort 1
Markedly, only two cohorts run through the year with mentors from a handful of industry juggernauts like Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and co-founder of Magic Eden Jack Lu, co-founder of Halborn Rob Behnke, co-lead at Polygon Zero Brendan Farmer, Vice President (VP) of Business Development and Listing at Coinbase Dan Kim as well as Miles Anthony, CEO and co-founder of Decentral Games.
Application is already open for the second cohort (Cohort 1) until January 31st. Leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has a similar accelerator program that cuts across DeFi, gaming, Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and Web3.0. The Most Valuable Builder (MVB) Accelerator Program is a project that is jointly led by BNB Chain and Binance Labs.
In October last year, Binance Labs announced its plan to invest in 7 projects picked from the MVB program.
