Hello everyone,
My name is Jason Rodrigues. I lead Founder Programs at the Celo Foundation.
Mission
We want to attract and nurture the highest quality founders and provide them with the best experience on Celo.
ICYMI: Founder Program News
RedStone from Startup Pathway raised ~$7M
Lemniscap led the seed funding round with support from Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Distributed Global, Lattice, Arweave, Bering Waters, Maven11 and SevenX Ventures. Read more here
RedStone Finance from Startup Pathway 2 has decentralized oracles available on Celo.
Masa x Cred Protocol: Soulbound Web3 Credit Score Launched on Alfajores
Masa, from Celo Camp Batch 4 launched the world’s first Soulbound (“SBT”) Web3 Credit Score to the Masa Soulbound Identity testnet to Alfajores. Read more here and try it out here
Cargo Finance x Uniswap v3 = Structure Deposits on Celo
Cargo Finance, from Celo Camp Batch 4 puts Uniswap v3 awesomeness into automated strategies needed to keep the investment within active market ranges. Read more here. Praise to Nikhil for driving this.
Celo Camp cross selling at its best 
One of my biggest goals has been to ensure composability at it’s finest. Ariswap, Ubeswap, Moola, and others already using Remox’s services and they manage over $60 million in digital assets through Remox. Follow Remox here.
Remox is simplified and collaborative treasury management for DAOs on Celo and they are Celo Camp Batch 4 alum.
Founder Programs Updates
- Smoothest wrap-up operations, and payouts for the previous batch 5. Praise to all the folks in legal, grants, and compliance for all the help. Before you know it next cohorts kick-off.
- Celo Camp Batch 6 is launching. This week we wrapped up applications at 350+ from over 60 countries. Big praise to all that amplified. Alon and Rachel are
- We are on track to have Camp officially kick off at the end of September. Stay tuned to know who the finalists are. Let me know if you’re interested in becoming an evaluators and getting a taste for what’s cooking on Celo.
- Ecosystem founders engaging in the telegram group. Let me know if you see someone that is building that needs to be added.
- We launched Founder Office Hours to help founders navigate the Celo ecosystem, solution design and tokenomics and just chill.
- Over 30 new leads were added to the pipeline from our presence at ETH CC Paris
What’s up next?
- We are focused on shipping the highest quality founder programs till the end of the year. We measure this on the basis of:
- Follow on interest in our startups
- Overall satisfaction of founders → High NPS
- Building out a value add platform for our founders, and revising our founder strategy.
- Tensions → We are a small team, and need to focus and need support to keep delivering.
Celo Camp Batch 6 Stats
Shout out to Alon and Rachel!
- We have our first set of applicants from Bukina Faso, Korea and Tanzania
- The largest number of applicants have paying customers. The insight here is that the overall quality of the startups entering is increasing.
- We continue to grow and scale
Events you get to see our alumni
- ETH Warsaw → September 1-4, 2022 hosted by our very own Marcin
- Berlin Blockchain Week → September 12-18, 2022
- Messari Mainnet NY → September 21-23, 2022
- DevCon Bogota → October 11-14, 2022
Let me know if there are others and if you’d like to be connected to the folks attending.
How do I plug in to Founder Programs?
- Recommend a mentor → Nominate yourself or someone on your network to be a mentor, this goes a long way in growing the Celo ecosystem. Take a look at the other mentors at celocamp.com
- Recommend teams → “Projects are the lifeblood of an ecosystem” (Amit Chu said this). Please send any cool teams that we should be looking at our way by having them apply at celocamp.com. We will continue to consider applications on a rolling basis regardless of what the website says.
- Amplify our work → Go to this page and retweet
Shout Outs
Founder Programs are a collaborative effort with several people across the organization and ecosystem, a big shout out to each and every one of them.