In September 2021, EMURGO announced the creation of a $100 million Cardano investment vehicle composed of two separate entities, EMURGO Africa and EMURGO Ventures, to invest into early startup and growth stage companies focused on building socially impactful solutions powered by Cardano.
In particular, EMURGO Africa’s investment thesis is to support the building of three hundred regional startups through seed funding and incubation, with the ultimate goal of having these startups adopt Cardano’s blockchain to develop socially impactful solutions and position Cardano as the technological platform standard in Africa.
For its initial launch, EMURGO Africa forged two major partnerships to rapidly expand the Cardano ecosystem in Africa by leveraging EMURGO’s knowledge of the Cardano ecosystem as one of its founding entities and the large business networks of its partners.
With our strategic partner Everest Ventures, a leading blockchain industry accelerator, we formed Adaverse – a Cardano-focused joint accelerator program in Africa.
Why Africa?
Venture capital investments in African startups is expected to total between $2.25 billion to $2.8 billion in 2021, indicating a large potential for high-growth startups in the local market.
In terms of the global blockchain market, the industry is projected to exponentially increase more than 120x from $3.67 billion in 2020 to $449.6 billion by 2028.
Africa alone is expected to possess a 30% market share and grow from a $1.1 billion market in 2020 to a $134.9 billion market by 2028.
Blockchain awareness and usage is increasing rapidly in Africa as indicated by the adoption of Cardano by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education to track students’ academic performance.
Cardano with its design principles built on scalability, sustainability, and interoperability as a third generation blockchain that is ESG-friendly offers fast and low transaction costs as well, making Cardano a proper product-market fit for the continent.
What is Adaverse?
Via the strategic resources of EMURGO Africa and Everest Ventures, the Adaverse accelerator provides funding and investment support to African startups building the next wave of DeFi, NFT, gamefi, metaverse, and other decentralized applications on Cardano’s blockchain.
Adaverse provides a strong accelerator program that spans 3 months, with a total of 24 hours of 1:1 mentorship and 12 weeks of intensive training for founders from a team of industry veterans and experts with intricate knowledge of Cardano blockchain development, venture capital, entrepreneurship, and financial markets.
The training program covers a broad scope including:
– product design for market fit
– tokenomics
– technical support
– Cardano architecture and design principles
– proper fundraising & listing processes
Adaverse covers early-stage startups ranging from an idea to post-revenue series A ventures.
Startups that are in the pre-seed phase can get an investment of $50,000 while projects that are entering their series A funding phase can access up to $2 million.
How Can I Apply?
Adaverse is open for applications year-round for the 3 months acceleration program!
The 2022 batch-1 program will begin in January 2022 through March 2022 and interested companies are expected to apply before January.
Any application submitted while a program is running will be scheduled for the next batch.
Adaverse expects and encourages startups to build on Cardano while maintaining flexibility and interoperability.
For further information, please visit www.adaverse.co.
To apply directly, please go to the application link here.
Applicants can send queries or inquiries to our official email address to official@adaverse.co.
About EMURGO
- Official Homepage: dev.emurgo.io
- Twitter (Global): @EMURGO_io
- YouTube: EMURGO channel
- Telegram: EMURGO Announcements
- Facebook: @EMURGO.io
- Instagram: @EMURGO_io
- Medium: EMURGO Announcement
- LinkedIn: @EMURGO_io
