Y Combinator 22: 🔥Top Web 3 startups

7 Most Promising Web3 & Crypto startups in Winter 2022 batch

Mar 31, 2022

Y Combinator's latest batch — W22 — features 414 startups from 42 countries, representing more than 80 sectors. About 50% of them are based outside of the United States with India (32 startups) as the second-largest demographic represented in the new batch. Nigeria is the next largest with 18 startups in YC - this is the first time an African country is appearing in the top three!

W22 companies are building in more than 80 sectors but Fintech + Crypto comprises more than a third of the batch. ~30 Crypto companies span various sub-sectors such as NFTs, DeFi, web3 services and crypto investing. As usual, this was a hard exercise to do, but we sifted through many of these amazing companies and founders in the space to shortlist 7 Most Promising Crypto and Web 3 Startups in Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch you need to watch out for! Without further ado, here is the list:

🚀 Top 7 Crypto & Web 3 Startups

1. NFTScoring: NFT Trading Platform

One line pitch: “NFTScoring is the place for you to discover, analyze and trade NFTs. We give you the superpowers to understand the NFT market in any given moment, make the best decisions, and take faster actions.”
Why it is exciting: NFTScoring is trying to build a better dashboard for NFT traders which accounts for some of the unique attributes that make some NFTs more valuable than others, all while helping users find trending projects early. A big emphasis appears to be tracking which projects NFT whales are buying into through tracking a network of wallets. The startup has premium tier pricing which users need to pay for with Eth.
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The team: Adam and David met while working together in the Avast AI research team. Together, they launched multiple companies, including an AI agency, and a logistics SaaS business. They are both technical founders with Data Science and AI master degrees.

2. Remi Labs: Everything a business needs to launch their own NFTs

One line pitch: “Launching an NFT collection can seem tantalizing for brands, however, when executed poorly can create long-lasting negative implications. We take the cringe out of NFTs.”
Why it is exciting: Businesses need to keep up and utilize the power of NFTs to help grow products lines and services. Launching an NFT collection can seem alluring for brands. However, when executed poorly, it can create long-lasting negative implications. Most businesses do not have the technical expertise, or the understanding of how to generate NFTs. Remi makes the NFTs for e-commerce businesses that want to sell to their customers. With Remi, customers don't need cryptocurrency, or even a crypto wallet.
The team: Brant and Dan both worked at Podium (YC W16) and helped scale it to $100M ARR in three years. Doug and Roger have spent the last several years at Vivint, leading sales teams of 1000+ across the country. We all launched an NFT project together and have spent a lot of time in the space as consumers.

3. LiquiFi: Carta for crypto / web3

One line pitch: “LiquiFi (“Carta for crypto”) helps companies and DAOs automate their token vesting, management, and distribution to employees, investors, partners, and community members. Secure, audited smart contracts guarantee timely distribution of vesting tokens and save significant time and resources spent building your own solution.”
Why it is exciting: Token management is a clear web3 startup growing pain and YC has always been particularly successful in helping scale “startup-for-startup” products. The team stumbled across the idea for LiquiFi while working at a previous crypto companies they experienced how painful it was to set up and distribute tokens with a vesting schedule. As a result, they decided to work together to build a solution that would solve this token vesting problem.
The team: Robin (CEO) and Oliver (CTO) were good friends for 6 years before starting LiquiFi. Robin worked as a Product Management Lead at various companies such as Eco, Adobe, Coffee Meets Bagel, and LinkedIn. Oliver worked as an Engineering Manager and Software Engineer at Set Protocol, Twitch, Amazon, and Salesforce.

4. Poko: Replace LLCs with DAOs in Emerging Markets

Pitch: “We are building Slack for Web3. We aim to replace LLCs with DAOs in emerging market cross border collaborations. We will take costly multi-step months-long company registration and setups down to $50 a month and with the ease of opening a Slack channel.”
Why it is exciting: DAOs are hot, but the tooling behind them is still catching up with the hype. Poko is leaning into the idea of using DAOs as LLCs which has some legal blurriness stateside but less so in plenty of other geographies.
The team: Van led Netflix marketing strategy and growth in Southeast Asia and Australia, establishing fan communities in the region. Sean is an avid community builder and podcaster in the gaming, sports and mental health space. Geoffrey built a digital identity product that had 20M+ users in India and Vietnam. They have known each other for 18+ years - experience include being founding team members of a $2B coin cap protocol, creating a blockchain-based exchange that partially exited to Binance, and authoring consumer protection recommendations at the World Economic Forum's Digital Currency Governance Consortium.

5. Chaingrep: Search for blockchains

Pitch: “Chaingrep is a search engine for on-chain interactions and digital assets. You can think of it as a new kind of block explorer. We think that current block explorers like Etherscan are too complicated to use for regular users, and that abstracting a lot of their functionalities and filtering out all the noise can dramatically improve the experience of finding on-chain information.”
Why it is exciting: The transparency offered my blockchains is only as good as the platforms that make interpreting that data simple and readable, something that will become more important as more non-technical users find their way to web3 platforms. Block explorers are hard to use and haven't changed in years despite the exponential growth of blockchains like Ethereum. There could be a better way to organize the cambrian explosion of digital assets like NFTs and on-chain interactions. Just like web pages, we won't be able to put them in labeled lists forever or even categorize them. Your interactions should be human-readable, and you should be able to find an NFT simply by describing it. Thats why ChainGrep is building an Etherscan for humans.
The team: Merwane (CEO) and Rosco (CTO) met in 2019 while working on their own projects. Rosco has a MSc in Computer Science and Merwane dropped out of university. They both worked as software engineering contractors prior to founding Chaingrep.

Pitch: “Argo is on a mission to empower Film and TV makers worldwide. It’s the easiest way to upload and monetize your content. Argo provides the technology and the ecosystem for the Filmmakers to monetize their film and tv work through advertising, subscription and NFT sales.”
Why it is exciting: Argo is a media startup focused on short films first and foremost, offering a platform for filmmakers to showcase their work while also tapping NFT sales as a way of helping them monetize their work and build buzz. Argo’s believes that short form content doesn’t just HAVE a future, but that it IS the future; and they are approaching it from “creators first” mentality that empowers filmmakers to monetize their work in new and innovative ways.
They are building a social ecosystem Argo is building for short films, bringing together filmmakers, film festivals, brands, and influencers to provide better recommendations and a more engaging experience.
The team: Arcadiy Golubovich was a seed investor in FUBO TV that IPOed in 2020. He found the largest entertainment financing company in Russia before that. He has built a career on being on the intersection of technology and entertainment. He has produced several feature films that premiered at top film festivals, and was an early investor in companies like Boxee that sold to Samsung, Fable that won several Emmy's for media innovation, Prizeo that sold to Custom Inc and more.

7. Finnt: Decentralized Finance & Crypto for Families

Pitch: “Finnt is the first DeFi app for families. We provide multi-user, high yield saving accounts, which make it easy to save with crypto for your children or family members.”
Why it is exciting: DeFi for families is an interesting take by mainly focusing on allowing users to link sub-accounts to a central investment account. While this is a bold bet since entire family savings are now potentially at risk in the DeFi world, there is a massive opportunity IF the guardrails are in place. Attractive value props here include creating cross-border savings accounts, using stablecoins to protect against inflation, generating high interest rates to beat unstable economy; and designing multi-users accounts to allow for better planning and remittance.
The team: Anji & Faouzi met in 2008 during their Masters in Computer Science. They co-founded DOZ.com in 2010, a Marketing SaaS that got acquired in 2017. Also in 2018, they launched together an Ethereum Dapp, Varanida.com, acting as personal data wallet, that peaked at over 200K DAU.