Alliance

Alliance DAO is co-founded by Imran Khan, Qiao Wang, and Jacob Franek. As shared on LinkedIn, Imran is a core contributor at Alliance and also a crypto investor at Volt Capital. He has previously been a venture partner at zk Capital and a network catalyst leader at Village Global. Qiao is a partner at Alliance DAO and formerly served as head of product at Messari. Jacob is the organization’s COO and previously co-founded Coin Metrics, where he worked from 2018 to 2020, after earlier roles in strategic market access and data methodology.

All crypto startups will benefit from the program, regardless of their stage.

Your accelerator and mentorship experience might differ slightly, however, depending on whether you're an early-stage or later-stage team.

We assist early-stage teams with navigating customer development and refining their product strategy. These teams are often working on large markets but need to figure out how to best capture the opportunity.

For later-stage teams with a solid product thesis, our value-add comes from deep domain expertise in crypto-native areas like token economics, regulations, and go-to-market.

In addition, both early and later-stage founders typically tell us that Alliance helped them expand their crypto network and connect with other top-tier builders, leading to direct impact in sales, user testing, partnership, and fundraising efforts.

Should non-crypto-native or Web2.5 startups apply?
Yes. We've always backed startups with varying degrees of crypto involvement – including fintechs, payment APIs, SaaS for crypto startups, AI products and more.

We view startups as existing along a spectrum within crypto. Some are deeply crypto-native, while others are less so. We don’t mind where you fall on that spectrum.

Our mission is to partner with the most exceptional founders in the world – regardless of the specific product you're building today.

The program relies on 4 core activities: lectures, 1:1 mentorship, weekly check-ins and Demo Day.

• Lectures: We run weekly sessions where successful founders from our community share their stories and learnings as crypto operators, followed by a Q&A.

• 1:1 Mentorship: Startups receive 1:1 mentorship from Alliance mentors. Discussions often revolve around product, go-to-market and fundraising. At times, mentors may also intro founders to experts within our network depending on the problem at hand.

• Weekly Check-ins: Founders share accomplishments and challenges with mentors every week to maintain accountability, momentum and gain insight on how to overcome potential blockers.

• Demo Day: 6 weeks into the program companies start working on their narrative and pitch. Then, on week 10, startups meet select angels and VCs at Demo Day – both in-person, at the Alliance HQ in NYC, and online – and graduate from the program.

Each startup in our latest cohort received an average of over 50 intro requests after Demo Day from crypto's most value-add angels or funds, such as Paradigm, Multicoin and Dragonfly. Most startups also receive significant interest from clients or potential partners.