Are you building the next big thing for the open data economy?

Returning in Q1 2020, we are recruiting, financing and providing a launch pad for pre-seed projects.

Apply now for the March 2020 cohort

Cohort 2 starting in early 2020

Launch our application form to register your interest with the Base Camp program

We are recruiting, financing and providing the perfect launch pad for pre-seed projects. Providing incubation space, hub services, and partnering with you on-site. Join us for three months at the Outlier Ventures HQ in a unique Convergence Accelerator to define and build your project.

  • 3 month accelerator program based in London
  • £35k immediate funding for 6% equity/tokens
  • Up to £200k total funding available per team
  • Office space, legal and back-office support
  • World-beating ecosystem of investment, enterprise and tech partners

Leveraging the combined resources of our tried and tested venture platform of experts, mentors and ecosystem we will add measurable value where each team needs it most. This isn’t a cookie-cutter program, but a bespoke solution for accelerating the billion dollar token networks and transformational web 3.0 businesses of tomorrow.

You will complete this program with clarity on your pitch, positioning, and have developed traction in your product to be in the best possible shape to secure your first seed round of funding. This is a unique opportunity to get inside access to the industry and build your venture with the leading minds of web 3.0.

30 staff and partners across Europe, USA, and Asia dedicated to building an open data economy

We partner with and advise industry defining decentralised tech projects resulting in a deep ecosystem of partners and collaborators to turbo-charge your ideas.

Funding

Selected founding teams will receive £35,000 in immediate investment for 6% equity and any potential token supply, and up to £200,000 of total funding, plus the value of our platform and back office support to accelerate your business.

Coaching

We provide critical in-house mentorship that will turn your decentralized concept into a fundable project.

Resources

Outlier Ventures will provide incubation space, hub services and valuable domain expertise.

Connections

Our global network with investors, exchanges, development talent and others, will expand and enable your future network.

Ecosystem

Access to the Convergence ecosystem will bring corporate, academic and blockchain-based relationships within arm’s reach.

What we are looking for

Leaders and teams with concepts in the decentralised space

We are looking for driven, humble, empathetic and passionate founders who want to build a more equitable data economy. You will likely be a small team with both technical and business expertise. You may have raised a small amount of money before, and are looking for your next step to accelerate your proposition, and get it in front of customers and the wider industry.

We are particularly interested in projects that fit our vision of the future web: The Convergence Stack. Spanning hardware, software, networking and applications, the stack underpins a private, secure, and accessible digital infrastructure. We believe these technologies are vital in ensuring the benefits of technologies like the IoT and AI are shared equitably beyond just a few platform monopolies. We see the opportunity of the Convergence Stack to decentralise these platforms and unbundle cloud services.

We want to make sure that this web is designed and built by people with diverse backgrounds and experiences to ensure the future web is inclusive and works for all.

The Convergence Stack

The opportunities we are looking for lie in the following areas of the stack:

Today machine learning is extremely concentrated. Data, algorithms, and trained models are owned by a select few global Internet giants. Techniques like federated learning, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and tokenization enables us to build secure, privacy-preserving, and collectively-owned machine learning. There is an opportunity to create software for an AI economy that supports a more equitable data economy.
Storage refers to how and where information is stored and the rules governing how it can be accessed. Instead of data being stored in the ‘cloud’ on the servers of a select few companies, new storage architecture aims to store data on peer-to-peer decentralised networks. We think the introduction of price and market dynamics for storage opens up a whole new innovation area for edge software that is only just being explored.
We need to make sure telecommunications networks do not become a point of trust in the convergence stack. With open-source hardware projects working on networking equipment, the software that runs on the equipment in the next component that needs to be decentralized. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are making networks more flexible and configurable. We want to support projects that are working to deliver networking software is both open-source and cryptographically secure.
Middleware is a bundle of APIs sitting below the interface layer providing services to developers to make it easier and faster to deliver applications and marketplaces. Middleware in this context is a coordination mechanism. If organisations are a collection of people bundled to solve a customer problem, middleware is a collection of APIs bundled to solve application-specific software problems. This turns low-level generalized protocols into application-specific tools. We want to support projects that make it easy to deliver new market solutions utilising the lower level protocols and software in the stack for things like 3d printing and robotics.
User experience refers to a range of interfaces that make interacting with decentralized protocols and technologies more convenient and intuitive. UX includes things like browsers and mobile apps that dominated Web1 and Web2 but also emerging interfaces that will become more important such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), voice interfaces (VUI), conversational interfaces (CUIs) and NFC tags. We think there is a huge opportunity for startups to onboard billions of Internet users with well designed experiences to make interacting with blockchains, tokens and smart contracts not just easier but delightful.

How our Base Camp works

Launch our application form to register your interest with the Base Camp program

Apply now for the March 2020 cohort

Selection Process

We will be reviewing the applications ongoing during the recruitment campaign, and if you are successful we will be in touch for an initial call, and then a meeting. We will be evaluating for thesis fit, team fit and for the quality of your ideas. We are looking for potential rather than for fully fleshed ideas at this stage.

Please note the accelerator is based in London, UK, and you will need to be physically present in London during March - June 2020. The only way to join the program is to apply online using the simple form, please do not contact the team directly - during the recruitment period we are getting a huge volume of inbound requests and it is not manageable to respond to everyone directly.

Onboarding

During the lead in to the project, we will ensure your corporate setup is suitable long term and that all your legal agreements are in order. We have relationships with service providers to help get legal, accounting and banking do not become barriers later.

During the first week of the program we will support you to establish what success of the program looks like, and how you will define and demonstrate the traction needed to take you to the next stage. This is not a cookie-cutter program so these insights will help define the rest of the program for you and your team. An OKR framework will be established and we will support you with reporting for this both within the cohort, and with your advisers.

Idea refinement

The first few weeks of the program will be focused on helping you to think through your core value proposition, getting your pitch straight, and then connecting you with valuable contacts who can guide and mould the delivery of that. We have a wide network of potential mentors, and the first two weeks of the program you will have the opportunity to meet many of these and refine your story. Some of these may become valuable advisors to you throughout the whole accelerator program and beyond.

Product development: customers

The core of the central part of the program will be focused on developing your product, and creating momentum with your key performance metrics. To achieve this core program content will be focused around understanding your market and competitors, supported by our research team, and understanding all the stakeholders within that ecosystem. A series of workshops will be run, to identify stakeholders, map the user stories and map the journeys.

Product development: technology

The program team will support you around key decisions in technology architecture. Outlier Ventures Labs takes an active role in our portfolio, including developing integrations and supporting with technology relationships, and partners.

Together Outlier Ventures and its partners are building the Convergence Stack - a complementary set of technologies that will make up the core infrastructure for web 3.0. The Base Camp program gives you the opportunity to contribute and integrate with this Stack, and collaborate with the technologists building it.

Our tech focused 400 attendee “Diffusion” event will be taking place in October in Berlin, and the program includes the opportunity to attend and contribute to that event.

Product development: corporate partners

A core strength of Outlier Ventures is the depth of our relationships with innovation and strategy teams in some of the world’s biggest companies. No project can develop in isolation, and in addition to connecting you to the crypto-community, we will also be focused on ensuring your concepts are stress tested with large organisations who will be fundamental to adoption and success of the technology long term. There will be a product development theme during the core syllabus focused on this, and connecting to our Convergence Alliance working group.

Elective content

During the program there will be a focus on your challenges and your particular situation. Working hand in hand with the Outlier team we will adapt the program to your needs.

If your particular need is working out token economics in more detail, or regulatory considerations, we will be able to dive into that in more detail with dedicated time mid-way through the program.

Fundraising

The final third of the program is dedicated to taking the evolved proposition, and the product development progress that you have made and bringing this to a wide range of potential supporters of your project.

To achieve this we will support you on developing the commercial proposition, and then in a structured way pitching to potential investors through a series of training sessions, warm introductions with feedback. The program will conclude with a Demo Day event in a conference venue where you will present to investors and ecosystem participants.

Aftercare

After the program concludes we will support you with the terms and finalising any further fundraising that has been agreed. There will also be operational support to ensure office and ops setup is seamless. If needed we can help with securing non-execs and advisors for your corporate governance. Finally, as an Alumnus of Outlier Ventures, you will have access to all the connections in our ecosystem

Key Terms

The core to the terms are very simple. We will provide you with £35,000 in immediate investment, plus office space, back-office and admin support, a product development program and access to the industry’s best mentors and ecosystem. In exchange for this we ask for 6% of equity, and 6% of any future token supply, and the option to be the first money in to any subsequent fundraising round.

Apply Now
We offer
In return for
£35,000 immediate investment
6% equity, 6% future token supply
Up to £200,000 in total funding
Option to invest at discount to next funding round
Office space, marketing resources, back-office support for three months

FAQs

Where will the Base Camp program be run?

The Base Camp Accelerator will be hosted at Outlier Ventures’ London HQ in Angel, London. Founders will need to be based in London for the period of the program, from March to June 2020.

Are you running Base Camp in North America?

We are considering expanding the Base Camp program to North America during 2020. Please sign up for our updates and we will announce future launches when finalised.

What type of idea are you looking for?

We are focused on building out our vision of what is necessary for web 3.0 to be successful - the “Convergence Stack”. We are already supporting projects across the stack but there a few areas that are currently underserved: learning, storage, networking, middleware and user experience. We are interested to see applicants from all areas of the stack but will prioritise those focused on underserved components.

Tell me about founders that work well with you?

We are looking for driven, humble, empathetic and passionate founders who want to build a more equitable data economy. You will likely be a small team with both technical and business expertise. You may have raised a small amount of money before, and are looking for your next step to accelerate your proposition, and get it in front of customers and the wider industry.

Why is Outlier Ventures the right early stage investor?

Outlier Ventures is a venture platform designed to support decentralised projects to design, build, and scale at every stage of their development.

We provide early-stage funding, as well as providing support via relationships, introductions, and access to specialists from across the venture platform. We have incubated and supported leading web 3.0 teams, and can bring a powerhouse of support to ventures building web 3.0 infrastructure.

How long will the program run for?

The core program will be 13 weeks long, running between September and December this year. There will be the option for extended support at the end of that period.

What will the program consist of?

This is a foundational three month product development accelerator for decentralised technology, that will develop momentum and traction in foundational technology concepts for web 3.0.

What happens after the end of the program?

The aim of the Base Camp program is to set founding teams up for long term success. We aim to leave you with clarity on your mission, momentum in achieving it, and being ready to close a significant fundraising round.

How do I apply for Base Camp?

We are working with F6S.com for the accelerator application process. Please visit our application form on their site and create a profile

Investment and support for ideas that accelerate the open data economy

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