Introducing the Startups of dlab v2

Real-world use cases for crypto from globally distributed teams

So much has happened since the launch of our first cohort of accelerator companies earlier this year. In the last six months we’ve seen several cryptocurrency market price movements (it’s never a dull day in this industry, yeah?), continued progress towards institutional adoption in finance and other corporate use cases, and an explosion of new decentralized finance applications. Some have even heralded the latter as being the first real killer app for Ethereum, with well over 500m in assets locked up in smart contracts as of this writing.

Real-World Use Cases

However, despite all the excitement going on in this corner of the world, it’s important to remember that these are all still relatively insignificant accomplishments in the grand scheme of things, and that the user base itself is still quite small. For example, it was recently reported that almost 80% of the total supply of Dai is held by the top 100 Maker CDP addresses. Clearly, for any of this technology to really matter, we need to get outside of the blockchain bubble and support initiatives that have broader ramifications in the real world, where the end users don’t care about buzzwords (and aren’t whales!) We need more people actually using crypto, which means we need to developers to focus on user experience, scalability, and (most of all) real-world use cases. At dlab we strive to work with entrepreneurs who are focused on these sorts of problems, and back them with the funding, resources, and mentorship they need to help them deliver products that solve real problems for them.

In our most recent cohort, we’re working with two companies who are contributing to the DeFi ecosystem in important ways, both building tools that address some of our core concerns about these products scaling to a wider audience (creditworthiness, integrity of data sources). Other problems we’re tackling this time around include account security and UX (3FA!), credential and identity fraud, employee compensation, and content distribution.

Global Focus

One of the things that we love about the companies that are working in this industry is that their teams are often just as decentralized as the technology (in some cases moreso ;-). Our staff reviewed hundreds of applications from more than thirty countries during our due diligence cycle this time around, and the founders we selected were truly the best of the best: the top 3% of all applicants. The six companies we’ve chosen to invest in for dlab 02 are a diverse group, whose founders are spread across eight different countries as far from our home base in NYC as Thailand and Uganda. Some of them are first time founders, while others are serial entrepreneurs with successful exits under their belts. Although each of the startups in this new cohort are very different, they all have a number of obvious commonalities: they’re using blockchain technology to solve a real-world problem, they’re focused on growing the decentralization ecosystem, and they have truly exceptional founders. And we’re excited to be working with each of them.

Without further ado, here are the six companies that we’re proud to be working with as part of dlab 02: