Outlier Ventures, founded in 2014 and boasting nearly 250 portfolio projects, has joined forces with the Aptos Foundation, the team behind the growth and development of the Aptos blockchain and its ecosystem, in order to create an accelerator program tailored towards projects building within the Aptos ecosystem, in its native programming language, Move.

Together, Aptos and Outlier are able to offer accepted projects access to a network of industry leading mentors and investors. Both Outlier and Aptos will further offer bespoke support, geared toward each specific start-up, and assistance with everything from entity structuring, through to product roadmap construction. 

The accelerator was announced in February 2023, and the small number of start-ups accepted into its first cohort have now been revealed to BSC News.

According to Bashar Lazaar, Head of Ecosystem for Aptos, "This inaugural cohort of the Aptos x Outlier Move Accelerator exemplifies the potential for broadening the utility, accessibility, and scalability of use cases, appealing to both new users and builders alike - a critical element of transforming the internet as we know it.”

Meet the Cohort:

Aptos Arcade: Born in the US, Aptos Arcade is a Web3 game studio that is even developing its own on-chain game engine, designed specifically for Aptos. The project’s mission is to build a comprehensive suite of gaming primitives to drive Aptos’ Web3 gaming ecosystem

ArmurAI: Originating from India, ArmurAI is an A.I.-powered security infrastructure platform. Users can create bespoke security tooling for Web3, boosted by the use of pre-trained A.I. models.

Duo: Duo is an Ethereum compatible blockchain running on Aptos, born in the US. By leveraging Aptos’ speed and finality advantages, Duo is especially apt to support Web3 gaming.

MoveFlow: MoveFlow is a programmable payment protocol that enables predefined transaction rules based on time and events. MoveFlow provides users with a highly customisable payments method, wherein rules can be set using time intervals, milestone completion, and a wide range of other criteria and conditions. 

SendInAir: South Korean-born, SendInAir is a fully decentralized NFT War Game on the lightning-fast Aptos blockchain, powered by cutting-edge Move smart contracts. SendInAir’s team plans to create the most sustainable Web3 game in the ecosystem. 

SwapGPT: SwapGPT provides an AI-powered DeFi aggregator and Liquidity Manager, that enhances the capabilities of smart contracts by leveraging AI algorithms to efficiently route transactions and actively manage liquidity across multiple protocols using no-code portfolio management strategies. The team’s aim is to help Aptos’ DeFi ecosystem reach its full potential. 

Wapal: Born in Singapore, Wapal is a no-code NFT creator studio, launchpad and marketplace, built on Aptos. Wapal's unique features such as on-chain randomness, permanent storage, and cheapest mint fees makes it one of the most scalable NFT launchpads in the ecosystem.

Yours (Blockwave Labs): Another South Korean-based project, Yours provides a one-stop NFT enterprise solution for customer loyalty management, and its suite of tools includes minting points, membership rewards and coupons, for Web3 users.  

What is Aptos?

Aptos is a layer-one blockchain, mainnet for which went live in October 2022. It uses the Meta-born Move programming language for smart contract development with speed and scalability among its core tenets.

At time of writing, Aptos boasts some $50 million in total value locked, according to DefiLlama, and its native token, $APT, has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.