Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal has unveiled the first 13 Web 3 companies to participate in Beacon, his newly launched startup accelerator.

The team has confirmed that companies involved in the next cohort will each receive $250,000 in support, for an $8 million post-money valuation. 

Fostering Web3 Growth

Nailwal announced Beacon’s launch late last year, with the goal of helping Web 3 founder navigate the challenges of the industry. It uses weekly sessions and mentoring to help startups build a community, market themselves, and launch their product. 

In an FAQ shared with CryptoPotato, the founder said that his team spoke with over 1,000 projects, from which 15 were chosen for Cohort 0, and 13 graduated Demo Day. These companies included Arcana, Blinkmoon, ChapterX, Colexion, Community Gaming, Cubist, FastLane, Meta Apes, Mystic Moose, Nillion, Davos Protocol, Timeswap, and Yilde. 

“We feel like Cohort 0 is our MVP of Beacon,” explained the team. “So for this cohort, we handpicked our favorite teams through taking calls with founders sourced through our networks.”

Cohort 1 will operate differently, using an open application process available until January 31st. The actual cohort will begin in April, for which the founder expects a similar acceptance rate of roughly 1%. 

Beacon said that FTX’s fallout had cast doubt on whether the companies within cohort 0 would stick around for the three-month program. “We completely scrapped [our user-focused] schedule and had to rewrite the whole agenda, with the focus of trying to provide guidance to our companies to help steer them through this turmoil.”

Beacon was a chain-agnostic program, and most founders were focused on developing cross-chain applications. “With that, we had the highest number of teams building in the Ethereum ecosystem,” it said.

Selection Criteria

The program used five core values for screening Beacon companies – with a primary focus on committed teams. “We are looking for extremely committed founders who have the expertise, drive, and grit to build the world’s best companies,” said Beacon. 

Beacon also welcomed teams within emerging markets that “may have been overlooked by the traditional VC and accelerator industries.”

The accelerator’s selection was “vertical agnostic,” meaning it welcomes companies across the entire category of web 3, rather than one specific vertical like DeFi, NFTs, or the Metaverse.