Starfleet, the accelerator of the blockchain 3.0 platform Aeternity has just chosen another four early-stage projects to back and will invest a total of $400K in them in the next months. They are the two Bulgarian projects Assetify and KingFootball, the German Cannomy, and the Swiss SmartCredit.

The selected startups are graduates from the acceleration program Starfleet and were chosen among applicants from 100 cities. In the next months, the four will receive intensive mentoring and based on the progress up to $100K venture investment. Unlike the first two editions of Starfleet, that were in Bulgaria, the third season of the acceleration program was carried out in Malta, the island well known for its blockchain friendliness.

“Starfleet Malta enables us to leverage our broad experience in developing blockchain projects, the strong expertise of our mentors and the support of the fast-growing blockchain ecosystem to welcome innovative blockchain companies into the AE Ventures family,” comments Nikola Stojanow, CEO of AE Ventures.

The new four

Two platforms that aim to change the way the lending industry operates, one that allows football fans to identify the authenticity of their merchandise, and one product aimed at easier funding for the growing cannabis industry – this is what the team of AE Ventures is planning to back. The four companies are now going through another six months mentorship program and based on the hit milestones all of them will receive $110K venture investment. Here are some more details about the selected startups:

Founded by a Bulgarian team, Assetify, is a b2b platform for crypto-backed loans, enabling lending institutions to provide credits using digital assets as collateral. The platform automates the relations between the user of the loan and the lender, creating multi-signature wallets. This is much cheaper and less risky. The company already has two paying customers — one bank in Switzerland and one lander in Bulgaria.

The German Cannomy is a pioneer of the cannabis economy, combining the benefits of blockchain technologies with the fast-growing cannabis ecosystem. The team is using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to source the funding of new ventures in this field and facilitate their operations and manage shareholders.

Founded by Bulgarians, but incorporated in Switzerland, King Football is using chips and æternity blockchain to help football fans track easily items and identify if they are fake or original. Building on this functionality, the team is creating a social platform allowing fans to receive personalized messages from football stars as well as to trade original items, creating a big secondary market. The popular Bulgarian football player Dimitar Berbatov is also involved in the project and some of his items are already live on æternity blockchain.

The Swiss startup SmartCredit is aiming to democratize the lending industry, using transferable tokenized credit, and thus helping every lender to become a bank. This huge industry is responsible for 90% of the money available today and its decentralization will bring significant new advantages. The platform will create 2-click consumer credits (money on demand) for the borrower and tools like credit tokenization, credit transferability and interest-bearing to the holder.

Portfolio is growing

The company runs an acceleration program called Starfleet that aims to fill the pipeline of the projects. The whole acceleration program is part of æternity’s strategy to catalyze an ecosystem of applications for its blockchain platform. Since æternity raised $35М in 2017, it has been focused on developing a secure infrastructure that would allow diverse decentralized applications to be built on it. Even though æternity also has an internal application development unit and several products in the pipeline, the company is looking to involve a larger community in the development process.

In July 2018, at the end of the first season of Starfleet, eight companies were chosen to receive in total $1.3M of funding. Back then the program, although open to everyone, was operated in Bulgaria. Тhree of the eight companies from the Starfleet 2018 batch were from Bulgaria – Tradex Social, weiDex and Noble Hire. Last year, the second edition was also carried out in Bulgaria, and four projects were selected for receiving funding of up to $100K each – the Croatian Cryptotask, the Maltese-Serbian Cryptic Legends, Abend from Germany, and the Bulgarian HomePort. The third edition of the accelerator Starfleet was in Malta. Next month, Aeternity is starting a new season – this time in India.