Program review – in summary
21 companies successfully completed their journey through three accelerator streams: Futureverse, Bitcoin, and Wormhole. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all participants and contributors whose dedication and efforts contributed to the success of this program. We invite everyone to delve into the highlights report to witness the achievements of these graduating teams.
Introduction
As Q1 2024 draws to a close, Outlier celebrates the culmination of three remarkable programs: Futureverse, Bitcoin, and Wormhole. Amongst hundreds of applicants, 21 exceptional teams were chosen to participate, showcasing the outstanding quality of founders and their teams that exceeded our expectations.
Throughout the intensive 12-week period, these selected startups received direct guidance from expert teams, established connections with industry mentors, and were introduced to potential partners, clients, and investors within the Outlier Ventures network, fostering enduring relationships.
The success of each Base Camp program is a testament to the collaborative efforts of various teams committed to delivering exceptional service. The unwavering dedication of founders, partners, Program Managers & Program Associates, expert teams, mentors, and guests has been instrumental in transforming this program into an unforgettable journey for all involved parties.
Bitcoin Base Camp
Outlier Ventures’ Bitcoin Base Camp helped bring teams building on Bitcoin to the next level with the help of our amazing venture partners at Plassa Capital and Ecosystem Partners at Rootstock Labs.
Leveraging their expertise, Plassa Capital and Rootstock Labs bolstered the program’s capacity to support startups optimizing the Bitcoin network’s functionality and scalability. With over 60% of Bitcoin’s hash power, Rootstock provides a secure platform for smart contracts, enhancing Bitcoin’s utility.
Meanwhile, Plassa Capital’s extensive experience in early-stage crypto investments ensured strategic guidance for startups navigating the evolving crypto landscape. Together, these partnerships enriched Outlier Ventures’ accelerator, empowering our startups to unlock the vast potential of Web3 on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Throughout the program, tailored support from Outlier Ventures, Plassa Capital, and IOV Labs nurtured innovation in DeFi, UX/UI development, asset issuance, and Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work consensus mechanisms, driving the growth of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Meet the Graduates!
Deep Lake is building Bitcoin APIs to be built on DLCs, Taproots, and PSBTs permitting users to launch and scale liquidity instantly. Users can build financial apps directly into Bitcoin mainnet, while allowing layer-twos and sidechains to settle their activity to layer-one.
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Joltz aims to unlock the Bitcoin economy by making Taproot Assets accessible. We build infrastructure to make the cutting-edge Taproot Assets protocol easier for developers and end users alike. With its Joltz Wallet and SDK, Joltz is powering new token use cases on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, including stablecoins, loyalty rewards, and more.
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Takenos brings a meaningful solution to compensate more than 10M LatAm freelancers, contractors, and creators. Our technology provides financial products necessary for digital and global workers to access their personal economy.
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Ordinox is a native cross-chain swap, focused on bringing EVM’s DeFi liquidity in Ordinal inscription based tokens (BRC-20, etc). We build the core infrastructure to enable token holders to earn yield while enabling a direct non-custodial swap ERC-20 and ordinal tokens.
SATI is revolutionizing financial inclusion by simplifying access to digital currencies. Starting in Latin America, they’ve launched our innovative WhatsApp-based platform in which users can effortlessly purchase, send and receive stable coins and Bitcoin at an unprecedented ease and speed. Their aim is to make sending cross border payment as simple as sending a message on WhatsApp.
Loka is a platform that enables retail investors to acquire BTC at a lower than market price through co-investing in Bitcoin miners without any exposure to centralized party risk, using their trustless non-custodial escrow and fully decentralized mining pools.
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SimpleFi paying with cryptocurrency easy and useful. They do this by building bespoke checkout experiences that are optimized and customized for each merchant, unlocking a new customer base at low fees.
Bloom team is passionate about demystifying Web3 and providing users with a secure, intuitive gateway to manage their digital assets. Their all-in-one interface offers a unique blend of token and NFT trading, dApp discovery based on social signals, and DeFi portfolio optimisation tools. With an emphasis on robust security, and catering to both savvy investors and Web3 novices, Bloom ensures an unparalleled wallet experience that’s tailored to user’s individual journey in Web3.
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Futureverse Base Camp
In their first joint accelerator program, Futureverse and Outlier Ventures partnered to launch the Futureverse Base Camp accelerator, funded by the new Born Ready fund. With early investments in Immersve and Crucible, as well as Fluf World, Outlier Ventures were early backers of the Futureverse ecosystem and early believers in their vision. The partnership thus flowed naturally out of a joint commitment towards realizing the shared vision for the Open Metaverse. The first joint accelerator program focused on selecting early-stage startups building on The Root Network blockchain, particularly on startups building infrastructure for the Open Metaverse. Futureverse’s technology includes AI content tools and The Root Network for metaverse development.
Meet the Graduates!
REKT is an on-chain oracle and platform for developers to build custom wagering markets. It processes real-world digitalized datasets and generates competitions requiring a wager using ML tech. REKT built the first and only skill-based market for the Roblox ecosystem that attracted 12k players that played 2k+ challenges in 2 months and currently are working on the next market at the intersection of SocialFi and fantasy sport.
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Gymvibe / Lifelike Digital specializes in the development of true-to-life virtual humans engineered for autonomy and seamless integration across the metaverse. Unlike ordinary NPCs or chatbots, their AI powered avatars possess a rich depth of character and personality. They have a life of their own and exhibit natural human behaviors, providing users with an immersive and intuitive interaction experience. Their purpose is to go beyond chat and give AI a spatial presence in the world. Using AR and VR technology to create new experiences with digital humans that share the same space as you, wherever you may be.
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Plurality lets users create personalized web3 accounts through easy onboarding and the option to connect their plural personas from existing social profiles. By connecting web2 data with the web3 account, not only do users own their social capital but can also selectively share it with dApps to get a personalized experience or with data consumers for monetization.
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Nucanon exists to democratise game design and make the creative process of building expansive game worlds accessible to more people. Leveraging advanced AI tools purpose-built for co-creative storytelling and game design, Nucanon enables small teams and hobbyists to generate lore-consistent game elements like characters, locations, quests and dialogues, allowing for faster, more dynamic story and worldbuilding.
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Spark integrates with products and services from crypto and tradfi, providing powerful workflow functionality through a unified interface.
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Intraverse is the Gaming-as-a-Service Marketplace for Brands to activate and retain their audiences. Intraverse is the layer between gaming studios and blue chip Web3 and Web2 brands, enabling brands and their communities to seamlessly create their own gaming experiences using studio-quality templates.
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MintPass is the travel companion app for earning rewards from your travel recommendations. The platform enables travellers to authenticate their experiences with mobile geolocation data to generate unique digital souvenirs that showcase activities. These collectibles power a recommend-to-earn ecosystem where travellers are rewarded for sharing their lived experiences with others as word-of-mouth travel recommendations.
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Wormhole Base Camp
Backed by the Wormhole Foundation the Wormhole Base Camp Accelerator program took a cohort of the most promising startups using Wormhole’s cross-chain messaging platform for building applications, products, protocols, or companies. With the financial support of our Venture Partner Borderless Capital the joint accelerator gave startups tailored support in the areas of cross-chain liquidity, infrastructure, data and payments, and decentralized identity. With a shared vision of advancing blockchain interoperability, this collaboration has catalyzed innovation in Web3 applications, accelerating the visionary entrepreneurs shaping the future of blockchain technology.
Meet the Graduates!
Lucidity is a cross-chain leverage aggregator that integrates with a series of lending/CDP protocols to stitch together the fragmented leverage landscape. The protocol is powered by an in-house discovery engine running on real and historical data, supplemented with automations and testing frameworks to allow stakeholders to optimally discover and manage multi-chain leverage positions. Lucidity’s goal is to serve as the playground to build use cases such as aggregated credit risk, cross-chain liquidations marketplace, unified risk assessment layer, with a vision of becoming the leverage liquidity layer of the DeFi stack.
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Intentify is an intent-based chain abstraction layer. Its value proposition is enabling dApps on any chain to onboard users from any other chain without further deployments or bridging. This can be realized through the Turing complete account contract supporting programmable cross-chain intents. This intent layer enables developers to build on any chain best suited for their specific use case and abstract the underlying infrastructure from users – expanding the user base and providing a web2-like UX.
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Scholes designed an options protocol that allows for capital efficient onchain markets as well as deep liquidity through the first aggregator of option contracts. Founders have worked together in the space since DeFi’s inception and have a deep knowledge of protocol design. They are currently developing their MVP with a private testnet deployed on Base.
Zoth is an ecosystem that connects liquidity and RWAs across Traditional Finance and Onchain Finance. The inaugural offering, ZOTH – Fixed Income (ZOTH-FI) is an Institutional Grade Fixed Income Marketplace bringing RWAs such as Cross Border Trade Finance, TBills and Soveriegn Bonds.
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Core contributors of Seshat are successful academics with a PhD in computer science and over 30 years of experience in data science and machine learning, numerous publications in top-tier ML and data science venues, and a successful track record of launching and delivering products. Born out of an extensive research project at the University of Waterloo, Seshat was developed through significant efforts to understand and address the pain points in predictive analytics for Web3. Seshat is deeply rooted in research and tailored to meet the real-world needs of developers in the Web3 ecosystem. Their product offers a range of services that includes an engine to build training datasets, an inference engine with low latency, a real-time data provider for inference, and off-the-shelf predictive features including vectorized Web3 entities.
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Temporal provides a shared omnichain vAMM. They empower users to participate in yield trading, interest rate swaps or on-chain bond market among others, thanks to a proprietary design of a continuous yield curve. They enable defi users to operate at the theoretical limit of efficiency.
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Meet the Outliers
Our dedicated program managers and associates guided the startups effectively using the OKR methodology. They held weekly one-on-one sessions and conducted regular check-ins; acting as the first point of contact for founders, they worked assiduously to ensure the teams had access to the necessary resources, mentorship, and advice to make significant progress.
During the wrap-up call of the program, the founders expressed the significant value they found in these calls and conveyed how much they would miss these weekly discussions.
Workshops and Mentors
Every activity and initiative in the Base Camp programs is intended to help founders progress. During the intensive 12-week program, founders participated in workshops, one-on-one expert sessions, and had the opportunity to network with mentors. The initial weeks were filled with high-energy activities, including pitching their companies to subject matter experts and mentors at Outlier Ventures.
At Outlier Ventures, we believe that access to top industry experts is a significant part of our value proposition and often the most crucial step for teams to achieve their product-market fit. Many of the founders singled out their relationship with mentors as the highlight of the program, as they were able to build report that lasts not just during the program but carries on way into the future. Founders got invaluable insights in various fields such as product engineering & UX design, fundraising, token design & tokenomics, marketing & community, and legal from both mentors and Outlier experts.
Throughout the program, teams not only attended workshops conducted by our internal experts in these key areas but also had one-on-one sessions with these experts, allowing them to brainstorm ideas tailored to their companies and products. These sessions often led to the teams finalizing their go-to-market strategies. We extend our gratitude to all the expert teams who shared their knowledge and expertise relentlessly in support of our shared vision of constructing an open and interoperable metaverse.
Mentor Highlights
We wish to thank our top Web3 mentors for brining their invaluable expertise to our portfolio companies and working tirelessly with founders throughout the Base Camp programs. Their work and dedication made a huge difference to the founders and their accelerator experience.
- Charlie Shrem, Druid Ventures
- Tycho Onnasch, Zest Protocol Co-founder
- Martina Skangalova, beingz Founder & CEO
- David Cash, Founder and CEO at Cash Labs
- Marco Marchesi, CTO at The Fabricant
- Zac Cohen, Founder and CEO Filebase
- Julien Rosillo, Head of Growth at DressX
- Phil Kelly, Head of BD @ O(1) Labs
- Zach Harris, Product Lead @ Grayscale Investment
- Chris King, BD & Ventures @ Flow Traders
We also wish to offer special thanks to all the experts who kindly offered their insights by participating in our Expert Office Hours.
- Steve Kirk, Earning Attention to Drive Growth
- Bethan Vincent, How to Solve Your Biggest Marketing Pain Points
- Zach Harris, Branding in Public
- Victoria Olsina, SEO for Web3 Projects
Perks and Benefits
We would like to thank all the Outlier Ventures portfolio companies that provide an extensive suite of services at no cost to Outlier Ventures startups. Our perks marketplace includes services from approximately 40 high-value partners such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Notion, HubSpot and Stripe. We are also able to offer access to various web3 services from companies such as Alchemy, Figment, Moralis + many more.
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