Mind Fund, a Hong Kong-based VC company that incubates and invests in the next global wave of technology companies, is pleased to announce the launch of the new Helix Accelerator in partnership with Hedera.
The Helix Accelerator, based in Hong Kong, is the first global accelerator to incubate projects building distributed applications exclusively on the Hedera hashgraph platform. The first batch will be recruited from the Hedera hackathons held in October across nine different cities on four continents.
“The hashgraph consensus protocol represents a new paradigm in distributed computing at scale, and the potential opportunities for distributed applications are immense,” said Adam Lindemann, partner at Mind Fund. In order to help realize this potential, Helix is a systematic program which will provide funding and mentorship from technology and business veterans. The program runs ten weeks, and is based in Hong Kong, one of the most vibrant cities in Asia. All projects are expected to spend the full term in Hong Kong, where living accommodations will be provided. Helix has a beautiful 6,000 square foot office space in the trendy Wong Chuk Hang district, and each project will receive US$100,000 upon graduation.
After the program, all teams will get access to Global Incubation Stream, a networking initiative by Mind Fund and its Tokyo and San Francisco based partner, Digital Garage, which supports graduates from their respective accelerator programs around the world.
“We believe Hedera has the best chance of succeeding in building the enterprise-grade public network that will be used by startups and enterprises for years to come. The quality of the team and the technology is unrivaled in this space and we want to help Hedera succeed by fostering the ecosystem with an accelerator. We think now is the perfect time for accelerators in the crypto space because the days of raising an ICO pre-product are over. It is advantageous for startups to at least have a working proof of concept before they raise institutional rounds, and we believe Helix can help with this,” said Mark Cheng, Mind Fund partner and Helix CEO.
“The Mind Fund team has a proven track record of selecting, incubating and scaling successful startups,” said Edgar Seah, head of Asia Pacific for Hedera. “We are delighted that they have selected Hedera’s fast, fair, and secure platform as the basis for Helix, and look forward to working with them and the companies that go through the program to build the next generation of distributed applications.”
Hashgraph has raised a total of US$124M. Of that, $20M was from the accredited investor crowdsale, and the rest from institutional investors (37% from APAC).
