Hot Startup Grants and Funding
Crypto-adjacent startup grants are heating up with Base Startup Batch offering $10k+ equity-free (deadline soon), 0G Apollo with $2M potential, Arbitrum Mentorship ($100k pool), and Solana MONOLITH Hackathon ($125k prizes, March 9 deadline). Recent raises include Rodeo ($8.5M Seed) and ARQ ($70M Private), with ARQ actively hiring.
The Arbitrum Mentorship Program is an eight-week, equity-free initiative designed to support up to 15 early-stage teams building on Arbitrum chains. The program, which starts on April 13, 2026, culminates in a Demo Day where the top three teams will share a $100,000 prize pool. Base Batches is structured into three distinct tracks: a Startup Track for early-stage teams, a Robotics Track, and a Student Track. The top 15 teams in the startup track, which is for pre-seed teams that have raised less than $250,000, receive a $10k grant and a spot at the San Francisco Demo Day in May. The 0G Apollo accelerator, a partnership with Blockchain Builders and leaders from Stanford's blockchain ecosystem, is a 10-week program for Web3 founders focused on the future of AI infrastructure. This program offers significant financial support, with the potential for up to $2 million in funding per team and up to $200,000 in Google Cloud credits. Solana's MONOLITH Hackathon is a five-week competition focused on developing mobile apps for the Solana dApp Store. Ten winners will each receive $10,000, and five honorable mentions will get $5,000 each. Rodeo, the social connection app founded by former Hinge executives Sam Levy and Tim MacGougan, secured its $8.5 million in a seed round backed by venture capital firms Foundry, 359 Capital, and Oceans. The funding will be used to expand the team, with hiring planned for engineering, product management, and marketing roles. ARQ, formerly known as DolarApp, raised its $70 million from prominent venture firms Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. The Latin American financial app focuses on using stablecoins for cross-border payments and has already surpassed $10 billion in annual transaction volume with over 2 million users. The new capital is earmarked for a rebrand, team expansion, and the addition of wealth management and high-yield account services.
