The Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator, a joint venture by organizations on the UC Berkeley campus – Berkeley Engineering, the Berkeley Haas School of Business and Blockchain at Berkeley, today announced the selections for its third blockchain Xcelerator cohort.
Over 140 startups applied for a coveted spot in the Spring 2020 cohort, but only 17 were selected; representing a diversity of industries including gaming, fintech, IoT, sports, energy, and healthcare.
During their time in the Xcelerator, the teams will engage with Berkeley’s network of mentors, researchers, faculty, venture capital firms, and student talent.
Spring 2020 cohort teams include:
- Acala – First-of-its-kind decentralized finance consortium, with a vision to create a cross-chain open finance infrastructure for the Polkadot ecosystem, bringing interoperability, stability, and liquidity to the crypto world.
- ARterra – The ultimate fan engagement platform built on the NEAR Protocol and providing sports franchises, eSports, teams, and streamers new opportunities for engagement and revenue.
- Blockstar – Building a marketplace for exclusive brands to offer branded virtual goods that connect to video games, VR experiences, social networks, and messaging apps, where the virtual goods can be purchased, rented and used.
- Blok-z – A white-label solution to verify the production, trading, tracking, and consumption of electricity all on one platform with an end-to-end certification of electricity origin – accessible to all in the marketplace.
- Calypso – A reverse auction site that enables borrowers to create personalized loan proposals, enabling lender competition.
- Cowri – Solving the future infrastructure interoperability problem, Cowri is a network of networks, allowing for the rapid, efficient exchange of stablecoins.
- Finoa – Your key to digital asset banking with custody and asset-servicing for institutions, corporations, and HNWI, based in Germany with EU licensing.
- GVOS.io an edge cloud using distributed storage and proprietary technologies to help create, simulate, store, distribute, and monetize HD maps for autonomous driving.
- Linkdrop – Web3 marketing in one powerful platform used by crypto projects and wallets to attract users by sending digital rewards to anyone via a link, SMS, email, etc., and enabling the claiming of digital assets without a wallet.
- Liquid Mortgage – A digital asset platform with the ability to create unique, loan-level digital assets and enabling the transfer of borrower funds to investors in a matter of seconds with revolutionary transparency and efficiency.
- Nodle.io – With a distributed, decentralized connectivity and payment network for IoT, Nodle is building the world’s largest wireless network to connect and secure the Internet of Things atop the global smartphone infrastructure, with over 5M DAU smartphones today.
- Nugbase – An Ethereum-based farming MMO game that treats cannabis with respect, and already with a community 1K+.
- OPGames – A suite of tools that helps game developers add e-sports-like tournaments to their single-player games and allows players to earn crypto payouts.
- Sixtant – Based in Mexico City, a proprietary high-frequency trading system for market making and liquidity services in crypto with strong banking relationships.
- Snark Health – Partner with your doctor; create health; earn money – deploying soon in Kenya in partnership with M-Pesa.
- Snowball Money – First smart crypto investment automation platform that is revolutionizing the way people invest in digital assets.
- Stake Technologies – Highly scalable infrastructure for Web3.0 via their new Plasm Network – a Polkadot Parachain and Dapps platform, enabling smart contract functionality.
