Aptos and Outlier Ventures join forces for California-based accelerator program

Outlier Ventures is launching a new 12-week accelerator program to support startups building on Aptos.

The program will kick off in May with teams participating in person in Palo Alto, California, said the company in a release.

UK-based Outlier Ventures runs one of the biggest accelerators in web3. The Outlier team have taken 187 early-stage web3 startups under their wing since it started running the program in 2019.

The new Aptos initiative will join Outlier's existing roster of programs including a Filecoin basecamp, a Polygon basecamp and a basecamp focused zero-knowledge proof technologies. It will be called "The Aptos x Outlier Move Accelerator."

Outlier generates some of its revenue  from enterprise partners such as FarFetch and Polygon, who pay to participate in accelerators, founder and CEO Jamie Burke said in a recent interview with The Block.

Aptos deepens its partnerships

Aptos is a relatively new Layer 1 blockchain. It launched on mainnet late last year and has raised over $350 million from investors since the start of 2022.

The blockchain's foundation is sponsoring the program and the Aptos Labs team will provide support throughout the 12 weeks on topics such as product roadmap, community building and entity structuring.

The accelerator is just one of a number of partnerships that Aptos has announced as of late, including an equity investment in social media app Chingari, a widereaching partnership with Google Cloud, which also includes plans for an accelerator program, and a partnership with Moonpay.

Applications open from today and accepted startups will receive $100,000 in funding as part of the program.

Since the start of the crypto bear market, there has been an uptick in the number of accelerators launching. Just this week, developer framework service Tatum launched an accelerator to fill the gap between traditional and web3 accelerators. Investing titan, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it received over 8,000 applications for its rebooted crypto startup school.