Startup Ideas
Qiao Wang
Below are some startup ideas and themes we at Alliance are excited about. This serves two purposes:
- To encourage you to apply to our program, if you are working on one of these ideas.
- To inspire you, if you are not sure what to build.
By no means you should feel that building something on this list is a requirement to be admitted to Alliance. In the past, we have backed many ideas that caught us by surprise.
AI/Crypto-Enabled Apps
Both AI and crypto are firmly moving up the stack. In crypto, we finally have blockchain infrastructure that is fast, cheap, and reliable for mass adoption. In AI, foundational model performance is following the scaling law predictably across multiple modalities. Independently and together, they enable novel applications every few months.
As a result, we no longer think of "AI apps" or "crypto apps" per se. Instead, we envision finance, social, entertainment, health, and education apps that are enabled by AI, crypto, or both.
Some half-baked ideas to inspire you:
- A stablecoin-powered remittance app where the user can say "send $100 to mom" and the AI automatically handles the transaction.
- A virtual power plant that makes AI recommendations to the energy consumer on how to save energy and is bootstrapped using a DePIN mechanism.
- A dating app where potential matches are suggested by AI and the man must to show intent by making a micropayment.
- A token-incentivized platform for contributing video data for robotics training.
- A fitness app where your friends can bet on your progress using crypto and offers AI-based advice on how to improve.
- A generalist AI personal assistant that finds specialized AI agents on the internet (for travel booking, cybersecurity, etc.) and pays them programatically in crypto.
- A prediction market for the long tail of events where AI generates evidence for both sides and automatically settles the outcome.
- A launchpad for non-technical people to create AI-generated apps and go "IPO" via tokenization.
- A peer-to-peer undercollateralized lending platform where personal information is verified via zktls and credit risk is assessed by AI.
- A college social network that uses zk-identity to ensure that all users are real humans and employs AI to moderate content.
- An app that makes it easy for brands and merchants to launch token-based loyalty programs while providing AI-generated recommendations to consumers.
- A crowd-funding app for early-stage scientific IPs which uses AI to predict their odds of success.
- An AI education app that preserves children's personal privacy using crypto or crypto-adjacent technologies.
While all these ideas are powered by both AI and crypto, it's important not to force either technology into your product unnecessarily. It's perfectly OK to build an AI-only app or a crypto-only app. Start with a real problem, then work backwards to figure out which enabling technologies can help solve it.