We’re thrilled to publicly announce EI Ventures’ DeFi Residency Program, an incubator for promising decentralized finance (DeFi) founders and startups.
The goal of this program is to be a premier one-stop-shop for founders looking to make their revolutionary ideas come to life. The EIV team has been working with founders since June 2020, but realized the necessity to formalize the process of building a startup from ground zero.
EI Ventures is excited to support entrepreneurs who want to build the future of finance, creator economies and decentralized applications.
Why DeFi and Crypto
For years, the crypto space struggled to find a product-market fit, with valuations of protocols and decentralized applications alike far exceeding user growth and usage statistics. But after three years of steady development, the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) exploded in mid-2020. As users began to warm up to the improved UX of crypto applications (starting with the wallets — Metamask — and decentralized exchanges — Uniswap), the total assets locked into DeFi protocols rose from 1B to over $15B in assets under management (locked) in just 6 months. The traditional financial stack is being reimagined for the future. Everything from lending services to synthetic assets and insurance are being issued onchain, with these financial products interacting with each other seamlessly and trustlessly via smart contracts.
Despite the breakneck speed of growth, as founders of early-stage startups and investors ourselves, we noticed the lack of resources and support for new founders in the space.
The One-Stop Incubation Program for Founders
Building applications that involve distributed financial infrastructure has unique challenges from designing sustainable economic incentive structures to navigating rapidly changing regulatory standards. As a startup founder, challenges extend further, from hiring a stellar team to raising funds from investors to accelerate growth.
We believe builders should be enabled to build. The common human goal is to solve problems and build products that are of use to society. Despite having incredible ideas, founders are often unable to execute without the right co-founder or an early team. In other cases, brilliant founders and ideas go unnoticed as they face an uphill battle with fundraising in a new environment. The EIV team has faced these issues firsthand and seen that the traditional venture and incubator model does not offer founders the best chance of success. Founders with a demonstrated ability to solve problems should be able to focus on their strengths and go from 0 to MVP rapidly. This is what we promise.
EI Ventures is well-positioned to help founders tackle the unique challenges faced by crypto startup founders. We have invested in, worked with and helped incubate over 20 crypto startups to date. By bringing our experience in engineering, product, design, customer research, and fundraising to the table, we aim to fill the gaps of founders and allow them them to focus on what they’re best at. We are engineers and technical problem solvers at heart, and our goal is to work side-by-side with founders from day 0.
If you have interesting ideas are interested in building a crypto startup, we want to hear from you. If you are a problem solver and are curious about the space, but know nothing about it, we want to hear from you. Our team will spend time with you and ramp up your knowledge of the space until you are ready to tackle interesting problems and build the first iteration of a product. If you are a solo-founder working on a product and would benefit from a team who will get you to MVP and the first seed round, then … you guessed it … we want to hear from you.
Reach out to us on twitter or email us: work@eiventures.io
Above and Beyond.
