Introducing Helix Accelerator’s First Batch of Startups
Hong Kong-based venture capital company, Mind Fund Group teams up with Hedera Hashgraph and Animoca Brands to introduce Helix Accelerator, the first global accelerator to incubate projects building applications on the Hedera Hashgraph platform. Hedera is an enterprise-grade public network for decentralized applications. The 10-week Hong Kong based accelerator brings together 12 startups from around the globe, including five regional winners from the Hedera18 Hackathon, and offers mentorship, networking opportunities, MBA student interns from two of the top universities in Hong Kong and US$100,000 in funding upon graduation. All 12 teams relocate to Hong Kong for the duration of the program with accommodations and office space paid for.
Edgar Seah, Head of Asia Pacific for Hedera, said, “The Hedera Hashgraph platform is uniquely designed to address the scale, speed, and security needs of distributed applications. We believe the projects being developed at Helix will fully maximize the technical capabilities of our network to develop entirely new classes of uses for distributed ledgers. I’m excited to see the participating teams showcase dynamic new use-cases to improve processes in areas such as micropayments, p2p insurance, data sharing, and logistics.”
Participating Companies
The Helix Accelerator will be home to 12 global startups during the 10-week program, including 5 regional winners of the Hedera18 Hackathon.
Payable Links — Global Winner & 1st Place in London
Integrate micro-payments at the core of the web to connect customers and providers. Using their toolset, “digital goods” merchants such as bloggers, streaming services, media content providers can adopt disintermediated micro-payments fast and seamlessly with non-invasive changes on their infrastructure.
HopOn — 1st Place in Bangalore
Micropayments for wifi sharing, it allows anyone to share their mobile data with anyone in the world for a small amount that the user decides upon.
Armada Chain — 1st Place in San Francisco
Targets the supply chain industry that is often underutilized, companies often ship half-filled boats and sitting on empty warehouses. Armada Chain is a modular collaborative supply chain platform that allows companies to share supply chain infrastructure with each other, providing utility to under optimized components and creating optimized supply chains.
Hashing Systems — 1st Place in Dallas
Domain registry for resource identification through the Hash Name Service. The solution, available on the Hedera network, will let users quickly find, offer and trade domains.
Otrafy — 3rd Place in Dallas
An organic food transparency platform that enables farmers to communicate the history of their products from the farm to the stores. Using DLT to prove products flow through organic supply chain vendors.
GenesisNet — Hong Kong
A platform for insurance companies to use distributed ledger technology (DLT) to dramatically cut the time for claims.
Ponder — USA
Micropayments for referrals in both business and personal use cases.
Hearo.fm — USA
Micropayments for music streaming. Artists can connect directly with other artists and their fans, sell their music for whatever price they like and discover new music along the way.
Ooniq — Lithuania
A peer-to-peer insurance application focusing on smartphone insurance. Their goal is to bring simple insurance solutions at affordable prices with instant claim handling and complete transparency.
Lumeos — USA
Everyday, millions of people are sharing their personal data across the web without controlling it. Lumeos is a decentralized data sharing platform where users can control who accesses their data and set their price on a data marketplace.
Snakt — USA
Currently, content creators are being hurt by large platforms (YouTube, Facebook etc) moving upmarket and abandoning them. Snakt is a platform which connects video messaging and creation, with payments, it allows anyone anywhere to make money making videos. They can talk to their fans in video-to-video conversations and get paid through gamified gifting.
Sandbox — Argentina
A decentralized gaming platform that allows players to become blockchain-empowered creators, but also fosters the underlying technology to make the Sandbox ecosystem a reality. It takes creative freedom to the next level and allows creators to monetize their games on a distributed ledger.
Mentors
Helix Accelerator will introduce 20 mentors, who are individuals with deep industry, investment, or entrepreneurship experience. They will share their knowledge and provide guidance to the teams. Here are profiles of a few of them:
Jason Chiu is the founder and CEO of Cherrypicks — a global leader in mobile innovation with a goal of creating compelling value and the best user experience for customers and businesses. An iconic industry leader and a frequent speaker at TEDx, EmTech, Google, and numerous university, startup, entrepreneurship, and leadership workshops. Cherrypicks was featured as a Harvard Business Case (#N9–807–106) and has won over 100 international awards. A thought leader and a well sought-after serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and mentor in the startup community, Jason has invested in over 20 startups in mainland China, Silicon Valley, France, and Hong Kong.
Brian Tang is the founder and managing director of ACMI, which provides inclusive global thought leadership, industry-wide consensus building and transformational support for technology, educational and policy solutions. ACMI curated and ran Helix Accelerator’s 5 full-day Blockchain and DLT Startup Master Class, and has just launched LEXi, a legaltech and regtech incubator, after organising LegalRegTechHack in conjunction with Global Legal Hackathon. Brian is also founding executive director of LITE Lab@HKU, an interdisciplinary and experiential program to foster law, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship, and is founder of Young Makers & ChangeMakers, an inclusive youth technology development and educational social enterprise. Brian was previously at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and in Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom and then at global investment bank Credit Suisse in Hong Kong focussed on IPOs and M&A.
Animoca Brands develops and publishes a broad range of original games, and also serves as global or regional publisher for select games developed by third parties. Most Animoca Brands games are free to play, generating revenue in two primary ways: when consumers pay for virtual items or services in the games; and when Animoca Brands sells in-game advertising across its network of hundreds of games. Animoca is an investor and mentor to Helix, and a long time business partner of Mind Fund.
DLA Piper is a global law firm with lawyers located in more than 40 countries throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, positioning it to help clients with their legal needs around the world. DLA Piper is a founding member of the Hedera Hashgraph Governing Council.
Our launch event is March 14th and demo day is April 18th so if you are in Hong Kong and interested in joining please email us at team@helixaccelerator.com with a bit of information about yourself.
Follow us on twitter for live updates here: @haccelerator
And here is our website: www.helixaccelerator.com
Thanks all!
