Web3 investors from 16 nations converged to witness these 6 Graviton-backed Indian startups make their pitch

Graviton web3 accelerator's digitally simulcast demo day saw participation from global VCs and angels, on the hunt for India's next web3 unicorns

BRAND CONNECT | PAID POST
Published: Jul 31, 2023 12:50:57 PM IST
Updated: Jul 31, 2023 12:55:23 PM IST

In image: Graviton team at the Bangalore chapter of the nationwide #BuidlerHunt

Graviton, a web3-focused accelerator backed by global VCs such as Hashkey Capital, Moonrock Capital, NGC Ventures, 369 Capital, Ascensive Assets, Stacker Ventures, MH Ventures, G1 Ventures, Infinity Ventures Crypto (IVC), and GravityX Capital, organized its Demo Day in July.

The event hosted over 70 investors from 16 countries, converging on the 6 teams currently undergoing acceleration at Graviton, after emerging as outliers from a pool of 300+ applicants.

Graviton has armed its first cohort with an infusion of institutional capital (a seed investment into each team), technical grants and integrations from a vast partner ecosystem, workshops with proven industry mentors to help the teams with business modeling, tech strategy, growth marketing, and fundraising, in addition to increased networking opportunities with VCs.

“While the ongoing ‘bear market’ sentiment fosters a conservative investment mindset around the world for crypto platforms, we at Graviton believe that world-class technology products led by visionary founders are always ahead of the curve, and always lucrative to serious investors”, remarked Arpit Nik (Founder & CEO at Graviton and a General Partner at GravityX Capital). Arpit and team have been busy identifying & empowering India’s strongest web3 founders since December 2022.


Founders from Graviton Volume 1, at the #AgeOfWeb3 meetup in Bangalore

Graviton’s first cohort is comprised of the following startups, who are currently raising their follow-up rounds:

Spydra - They help large enterprises migrate their existing tech stack from web2 to web3 with zero friction. Spydra marks the largest status-quo migration in enterprise tech, since AWS itself. They already have clients such as Raymond, Myntra, and the National Payments Corporation of India on their roster. Manish Tewari (ex-Koovs, Pokkt) and Ashwath Govindan (ex-Microsoft) are changing the future of enterprise blockchain at Spydra.

Wall - Wall is solving a very important problem for web3 projects - community building. Through their quest platform, Wall has helped 40+ projects design custom user journeys to acquire & reward community members, and is now the go-to community growth solution for L1 & L2 ecosystems. Anuj Kumar Kodam (ex-IIT KGP, ex-IIM C, ex-Ola Cabs) and Amarnath Jayanti (ex-Cabplay) are steering Wall into explosive growth.

Strive - With a proprietary layer that facilitates the sharing and trading of NFT utilities, Strive is changing the definition of what you can do with NFTs today. They allow any business, brand, or community to monetize its audience and influence with ease. CEO Kartik Mehrotra (ex UC Berkeley) leads the show at Strive, alongside CTO Sanhitha Napa.

Zoth - The total value of crypto finance breached $1T in 2022, but is largely inaccessible to many capital seekers. Pritam Dutta & Koushik Bharghav (ex Ab-InBev) are on a mission to democratize access to affordable capital, via the tokenization of real world assets. Zoth has already deployed $500K in capital, with nearly $10M in their managed assets pipeline. They’ve also been selected into the Chainlink Build Program.

Fetcch - Fetcch wants to make web3 payments as simple as Venmo or Paypal, with an abstracted middleware layer that removes the complexities associated with wallet addresses. Mandar Ray & Satyam Kulkarni are solving a giant piece of the web3 mainstream adoption puzzle, at Fetcch.xyz.

GG Nation - GoodGameNation is an Indian eSports aggregator, with 250+ college partnerships across 18 cities, and 200K+ student gamers.  Their CEO Abhinandan’s perfect track record includes 2 of India's biggest sports IPs - the Indian Racing League and Premier Futsal.

Graviton’s 16-week program has enriched all 6 teams, as well as the participating mentors, such as Arjun Kalsy (ex-Polygon), Vijay Pravin (bitsCrunch), and Parth Chaturvedi (Coinswitch) among others, with a circular rewards model that assigns advisory tokens to each mentor, proportionate to the time they’ve spent nurturing each startup.

Graviton’s success is owed largely to Program Director Jeffrey Broer, a seasoned investor at Mulana Capital, and a highly sought-after web3 mentor and speaker.

“Supporting visionary entrepreneurs on their transformative journeys in the web3 realm brings me immense joy. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the nurturing Graviton ecosystem for promoting an inclusive culture of progress. May the six teams embark on a remarkable path of growth and achievement!”

- Vijay Pravin (CEO, bitsCrunch & Growth Mentor at Graviton)

“All hands aboard is the philosophy that drives us to help startups and founders. We’re glad that this team of web3 disruptors came together at Graviton, and forever indebted to our invaluable mentors, who have helped craft this journey together. With everyone’s hearts set on building sustainably for the decentralized internet, we’re just really excited about what the future holds for the Indian web3 space”

- Vishal Sanap (Head of Portfolio Growth & Development at Graviton)


The pages slugged ‘Brand Connect’ are equivalent to advertisements and are not written and produced by Forbes India journalists.