IDEO CoLab Launches Collaborative DeFi Incubator & Residency Program
In partnership with industry leaders and protocols, IDEO CoLab Ventures is incubating DeFi startups through an extensive, hands-on model
We’re thrilled to publicly announce IDEO CoLab Ventures’ DeFi Residency Program, an incubator for promising decentralized finance (DeFi) founders and startups. The Program, which has been running since June 2020, aims to be the world’s leading place for talented, creative founders to bring their revolutionary ideas to life.
IDEO CoLab Ventures is excited to support entrepreneurs who are making finance more open, free, and equitable, and creating the infrastructure for a new economy.
Why DeFi
After over two years of development, decentralized finance made headlines as fintech’s next disruptive wave in the summer of 2020 — growing from $1B to over $15B in assets under management in the last six months. The entire financial stack is being rebuilt from the ground up, with each layer open and interoperable with others. This system combines smart contracts, composability, and incentives for contributors to create new forms of exchange, lending, savings, insurance, and other financial building blocks at breakneck pace.
We’ve been investing in and helping incubate DeFi startups since early 2019 and are eager to support more founders contributing to this groundbreaking open financial system with an equally innovative incubation program.
A Collaborative Incubation Program for Founders
Building distributed financial infrastructure has a number of unique challenges, from simplifying complex products and navigating regulatory uncertainty, to designing a sustainable economic model and hiring a team.
IDEO CoLab Ventures is well-positioned to help founders tackle these unique challenges. In addition to our team’s combined 20+ years of experience working in crypto, we’ve invested in and helped incubate over 30 crypto startups to date. We do this in part by bringing IDEO’s full range of capabilities in the areas of product, design, customer research, and more to the table. We are designers and builders at heart, and we thrive when working side-by-side with founders as part of their extended team.
“Having IDEO CoLab Ventures as an investor has been one of our biggest step-change opportunities as a company. It isn’t just about the funding, but the whole community and array of resources. It’s a one-stop-shop for building a startup. Already they have helped us in every aspect of the company, from detailed product design support, to connecting with customers and partners, to thinking about our broader strategy.”
— Mike Sall, CEO, Goldfinch
“As members of the IDEO CoLab first DeFi Residency cohort, we were delighted to spend regular check-in time with fellow DeFi builders, share common problems, discuss solutions, and get proactive practical help. The IDEO team are a breath of fresh air, they have a distinct core expertise in UI and product development, and are genuinely focused on the product. Any founder or investor would be remiss not to work with IDEO.”
— Ana Andrianova, CEO, Akropolis
“After every discussion with the IDEO team or teams in the residency I gain more energy. Building in Defi is simultaneously designing mission critical systems and exploring the frontier with your communities, both extremely intimidating journeys. Being able to share these experiences with other teams on the frontier is invaluable.”
— Alexander Angel, Founder, Primitive
“IDEO CoLab has been incredibly supportive of Fairmint since literally our inception. The team is brilliant and helped us navigate through the many design and UX challenges we had. They are at the heart of the community, which helped us create very valuable contacts that serve us up to this day.”
— Thibauld Favre, CEO, Fairmint
Meet Our Current Residents
We’ve been quietly working behind the scenes with Residents for almost six months, and are excited to celebrate these teams as they launch into the world. Selected from hundreds of applicants, these Residents represent the most talented founders in crypto who are seeking to solve DeFi’s most important challenges:
Current DeFi Residents:
- Akropolis: decentralized savings and lending protocol
- ARCx: synthetic asset protocol
- Boardroom: universal governance management platform
- Goldfinch: undercollateralized lending protocol
- Notional Finance: decentralized fixed rate lending protocol
- Primitive Finance: permissionless options protocol
- Shell Protocol: stablecoin liquidity pool protocol
- Slingshot: decentralized trading platform
- Syndicate: decentralized asset management protocol
- Unannounced: decentralized exchange protocol
Past DeFi Residents:
- Fairmint: continuous equities offering platform
- Futureswap: decentralized futures exchange
- PoolTogether: no-loss prize game protocol
Calling All DeFi Founders, Liquidity Providers, and Collaborators
Reach out to connect and collaborate with us and any of our teams. Today we are also launching IDEO CoLab’s Discord for founders, developers, designers, investors, liquidity providers, protocols, and more to directly engage with us and our DeFi Residents: https://discord.gg/xh822DFCQv
In 2021, we’re excited to scale our Residency Program in DeFi as well as extend it into new thematic areas like Crypto Social. Please reach out if you’re interested in becoming involved in the Residency Program or working together:
- Follow us on Twitter: @IDEOVC
- Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/xh822DFCQv
- Entrepreneurs and startups: startups@ideo.com
- Investors and liquidity providers: investors@ideocolab.com
- Collaborations: startupstudio@ideo.com
- Our team: Ian, Joe, Gavin, Tara
We’re incredibly humbled to have close relationships with leading protocols, organizations, and experts who have offered their support:
Stani Kulechov, Founder of Aave, Arianna Mcclain, Director of Research Cruise (ex Doordash, IDEO), Avichal Garg, Managing Partner of Electric Capital, Cami Russo, Founder of The Defiant, Jonathan Alexander, CTO of OpenZeppelin, Vance Spencer and Michael Anderson, Co-Founders of Framework Ventures, Imran Khan and Qiao Wang, Chicago DeFi Alliance, Anil Lulla, Jose Macedo, and Tom Shaughnessy, Co-Founders of Delphi Digital, Jesse Walden, Founder of Variant, Reuben Bramanathan, Co-Founder of fair launch capital, Dan Elitzer, Co-Founder of Nascent (ex IDEO) , Steven Becker, COO of Maker Foundation, Lowell Ness, Partner, Perkins Coie, Nancy Wojitas, Partner, Cooley, Andy Albertson, Partner, Fenwick, Xochitl Cazador, Celo, Sina Habibian and Robbie Bent, Ethereum Foundation, Konstantin Richter, CEO of Blockdaemon, Vivek Singh, COO of Gitcoin, Mimi Idada, Manager of Open Web Collective, and many more.
