Budding! Inventory of the 26 projects selected for a16z CSS 2023

The 26 entries this time cover tracks such as encryption infrastructure, creator tools, and Web3 games.

Written by: angelilu, Foresight News

a16z Crypto re-launched the Crypto Startup School (CSS) after 3 years, and expanded it into a comprehensive accelerator program aimed at cultivating and supporting a new generation of Web3 projects. This is very attractive to start-up projects. Not only can they get financial support, but they can also get the guidance of top encryption venture capital. In the CSS that was first launched in February 2020, excellent Web3 encryption such as Phantom, Flashbots, and Goldfinch have emerged. Therefore, after the application was opened, more than 8,000 teams from 15 countries and regions applied. The team has a wide range of products, covering infrastructure, creator tools, and Web3 games.

a16z Crypto selected 26 teams to participate in the Crypto Startup School which started on March 7th this year for a period of 3 months, and held a Demo Day on May 25th. Participating in the project will receive $500,000 in seed funding. With the support and acceleration of CSS, these projects are expected to continue to develop and advance the innovation of Web3 technology. Let's dig out the gems together. The following is a brief introduction of the 26 participating projects.

Blockus

Blockus is a service that encapsulates and provides account management and NFT sales pages. Its goal is to provide game studios with seamlessly integrated account and wallet management, NFT market and staking, fiat and encrypted payments, etc., to help developers focus on Innovation in gameplay.

Discove

Discover is a decentralized SNS platform that aims to provide users with simple tools to create personal feeds. Through the integration with the decentralized social network Farcaster, Discover allows users to easily create and share content sources they care about, and build a community of personal interest.

Get on

Fuul is a marketing engine focused on Web3 services, designed to help projects find and manage growth partnerships. Leveraging Fuul's smart contracts for trustless and transparent advanced conversion tracking, automated payments, and more, developers can better measure campaign effectiveness and optimize growth strategies.

ZeroDev

ZeroDev is an embeddable and programmable smart wallet that supports "account abstraction" and is compatible with ERC-4337's AA wallet core, API, SDK, etc. It includes functions such as sponsoring Gas for users, batch transactions, and automated transactions.

Primev

Primev is a decentralized data protocol designed to provide MEV participants with on-chain data. Through Primev, users can obtain and share information about MEV, promoting the development of the entire MEV ecosystem.

ChainPatrol

ChainPatrol is a Web3 real-time security platform that provides false website and suspicious address information collection services, collects information from Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Google Ads and other channels, and warns users of phishing risks through reports.

Plurigrid

Plurigrid is committed to creating a decentralized energy system, optimized through digital technology and governed by the principles of sustainability, inclusiveness and value creation for all stakeholders. It aims to transform the energy sector and contribute to a more resilient and sustainable world.

Web3Analytic

Web3Analytic is a tool that focuses on DeFi product analysis. It helps Web3 product and marketing teams convert, attract and retain more users through code-free user analysis. It also includes functions such as competitive product analysis.

Shield

Shield is a security enhancement tool for Web3 platforms and communities that helps organizations take comprehensive security measures to prevent cryptographic exploits, Shield's threat detection software can be integrated directly into any platform via API, or as a security bot for online communities to Discord. Shield announced in April that it had raised $2.1 million in funding.

Mentaport

Mentaport is a Web3 geolocation platform that enables the creation of smart contracts that are aware of physical location and update over time.

Brakes

Frens is a messaging app for Web3 browsers designed to provide a better social experience and communication platform.

Handsome

Bello is an analysis tool for NFT project holders, which helps users understand the relationship between NFT projects and holders, and provides relevant analysis and insights. It is currently in private testing.

Narwhal

Narval is a customized wallet platform for DAO, Web3 guild, NFT fund and other organizations. It controls, protects, manages and uses users' NFT and digital assets through Web3 native policy control.

Eth.id

Eth.id is a personal Web 3 Profile website that helps users display a collection of personal related links and NFTs on Web2 websites by linking "me.eth.id" with Ethereum addresses.

formless

formless is a creative technology lab focused on developing the decentralized media application Share Protocol, a digital content distribution engine that uses peer-to-peer, pay-per-access microtransactions on the blockchain for decentralized distribution.

Capsule

Capsule is a wallet toolkit implementing programmable MPC, designed to help developers create wallets with interoperable transactions, seamlessly connect users with Web3 services, and conduct transactions and signatures. Capsule was founded last year by Nitya Subramanian, the former product leader of Layer 1 blockchain Celo, and completed a round of financing in March this year, with an undisclosed amount of financing.

IYK

IYK is a project that aims to create a bridge between the physical world and the digital world. By linking shirts with built-in NFC chips to NFT, users can interact and experience with digital assets.

FINE

FINE is a Web3 studio focused on generating art and interoperable assets, bringing unique artistic experience and interactivity to users.

Pimlico

Pimlico is an encryption infrastructure for account abstraction, which can provide wallets with its plug-and-play API to sponsor users' transactions, and can increase the number of users for DApps to initiate transactions.

'mbd the world

'mbd the world aims to build a better AI recommender system, making it accessible to anyone, which supports users to create Web3 search and social feeds,' the AI behind mbd accepts from Web3 open protocols such as Lens, Farcaster and Mirror) for training on all data

Sky Lab

Sky Lab aims to provide tools for building games on the self-governing chain, design constraint mechanisms, and set value distribution functions to reward developers for building valuable games and motivate players to make progress.

Stackr Good

Stackr Labs is building a unique modular Rollup SDK that enables developers to build tiny Rollups using general-purpose programming languages. It aims to simplify Rollup development, that is, run the state machine off-chain and publish the calculation data back to L1. Developers only need to focus on how to build the state machine, and other parts of the Rollup infrastructure will be handled by the SDK.

KIKI World

KIKI World is building a beauty platform owned by customers in the future, providing physical beauty products and products on the chain, and users can vote for newly released physical beauty products, including virtual membership passes.

Lockbox

Lockbox is a smart contract based self-hosted solution for permissioned and scalable crypto asset management.

Hourglass

Hourglass is a Web3-native browser that integrates wallets, personalized feeds, and large language models (LLM), aiming to simplify the current fragmented Web3 experience.

Gandalf

Gandalf supports creators to set tokenized gated content, and only those with access conditions can view the creator's content, and supports content from platforms such as Typeform, Notion, and Substack.