NEAR Foundation, the organization behind the NEAR blockchain, has opened an application to allow patterns around the world to join its acceleration program. The NEAR Acceleration program is a project initiated by NEAR to help early-stage team building on the NEAR protocol to scale their project with resources in the form of financial support, marketing systems, and mentorship from experienced business personalities.
Although the program has shown huge progress over years with more than $90 million given as capital to over a thousand teams building on NEAR protocol, the NEAR foundation explained that there is a need to partner with other contributors to make the program even more successful.
These contributors are expected to come in handy as mentors and advisors; sources of business system documentation such as tokenomics, and marketing strategies; and access to investment opportunities.
In essence, NEAR says it wants partnerships with existing acceleration programs to leverage the partner’s experience in running cohort-based acceleration programs and to run Beta tests for projects being developed by NEAR.
Criteria for submission as partner
The first criterion listed by the NEAR foundation is a strong sourcing capability as it relates to how the partners select teams for projects. In the document, the prospective partner is meant to highlight these: an investment thesis and the degree to which it does and does not align with that of NEAR, a system of sourcing and acquiring top caliber teams, and a system of vetting teams to ensure quality.
The second criterion demanded by NEAR is the scope of the accelerator program the prospective partner plans to initiate. In response to this, the partner is meant to explain its program scope and sequence in terms of learning opportunities and delivery method; advisory and mentorship system; length of the program; post-program services; the number of cohorts and anticipated cohort size (number of projects); and region of focus around the world.
On the third requirement which is about the track record of success of the partner, NEAR foundation requests for the date when the program started; the number of projects and cohorts that have graduated from the program; projects names per cohort; feedback from teams that have attended the program; data of teams that have closed their first or next round after graduating from the program; and average and median amount all graduating teams have raised after the program.
Prospective partners are also asked to write down their approach to investment including standard allocation if applicable, percent of equity and tokens given to the team, and approach to follow-on investment.
Further into investment, NEAR highlights that submissions should carry details of the proposed approach for the accelerator – NEAR cohort, chain agnostic, or both; budget for the project; proposed startup date of the program, and/or adherence to the1 ongoing program.
Lastly, applications should come with details of how the program will support the NEAR ecosystem on a larger note. According to NEAR, feedback here can include how the partner-to-be will support Near projects that are not admitted into the accelerator program; the cost for the support; and how the services provided in general will scale.
Startups that want to be part of the NEAR accelerator program can register here while prospective partners can submit their applications here.
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