Lumos Labs launches accelerator for India’s Web3 community

Lumos Labs, an innovation management firm, has launched ‘The Hatch Web3 Accelerator for Hedera’ inviting Indian Web3 startups to grow at scale with Hedera’s distributed ledger services. 

Launched in partnership with The HBAR Foundation, which supports the creation of Web3 communities built on the Hedera network, the accelerator program will comprise of two cohorts of five months each. The program aims to encourage and empower innovators in the Web 3.0 space to scale their blockchain and distributed ledger solutions, and to augment awareness and adoption of Hedera technology within the Indian developer community. Finalists from each cohort will be eligible to receive grants from a pool of $150,000 each from the HBAR Foundation, along with mentorship and go-to-market guidance.  

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The Accelerator participants will also receive expertise and web development support from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and expertise in legal aspects of starting up as a Web3 company, understanding the nuances in taxation and auditing for Web3 startups from PwC. The startups will also receive network access and potential funding grants from VC partners like, We Founder Circle, Woodstock Fund, Fracton Ventures, Mapleblock and CoinDCX contingent on their due diligence process and investment thesis fit. 

“With this accelerator program, alongside partners like AWS and PwC, the HBAR Foundation aims to strongly support the Hedera ecosystem and adoption in India, where organisations and developers have shown a great deal of interest,” Rob Allen, SVP, Ecosystem Acceleration, at the HBAR Foundation said.  

According to Lumo Labs, the shortlisted solutions will enter a bootcamp phase during the program. The winners will receive mentorship from the industry leaders along with integration and technology support. ‌By participating in the accelerator, developers and founders can build and scale applications that leverage Hedera's speed, security, scalability, and finality, while establishing connections with like-minded people and leading IT experts, it said.    

“India has been a global blockchain startup hub in recent years and has been positive about the potential of this technology. This initiative is focussed on overcoming the barrier that startups come across in their journey and we are excited to be a part of this,” said Kaavya Prasad, Founder, Lumos Lab, adding that registration is now open across the country. 

India has become the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world after the US and China, the Economic Survey 2021-22 released in January 2022 showed. The Survey noted that the government recognised over 14,000 new startups in 2021-22 against 733 in 2016-17. With this, the total number of recognised startups in the country surpassed 61,400.