Meet The Builders: The First Cohort of Arbitrum Mentorship Program
Supporting early-stage teams is critical to the growth of the programmable economy.
Early decisions around infrastructure, distribution and product design shape how businesses scale and ultimately define what the next generation of onchain products looks like.
That’s why the Arbitrum Foundation launched the Mentorship Program in February to back builders at the earliest stage where the next generation of onchain products is being defined.
Over 900 teams applied, signaling growing demand from early-stage teams looking to build in environments where they can move at software speed, access deep liquidity, and scale without giving up control over how their products operate.
The interest from teams spanned every major vertical shaping the programmable economy from DeFi (256) to infrastructure (153), AI (120), payments (110), and RWAs (88).
Together, it points to a broader shift: early-stage teams are choosing where they can define how their businesses run - programmable on the Arbitrum Platform.
Teams will collaborate closely with our ecosystem partners, including Pendle, Variational, IOSG, and Horizen Labs, and have access to curated introductions to top-tier venture partners such as Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Lightspeed, and Tandem by Offchain Labs.
Let’s welcome the first 13 early-stage teams into the cohort.
Meet the Teams Building the Programmable Economy
DEX traders today face thin liquidity, volatile funding rates, and limited markets. Every exchange builds its order book from scratch. Carbon taps into existing off-chain markets. Full TradFi liquidity, onchain. Every other DEX recreates liquidity. Carbon plugs into it. 750+ markets, stable rates, tighter spreads
Building the rails for tomorrow's onchain finance. The space is powerful but fragmented. Users bounce between eight apps to do what belongs in one. Swap here, launch there, trade perps somewhere else.
Prism brings every primitive into a single superapp: AMM, launchpad, prediction markets, perps and more. All through organic traction
Options are the backbone of traditional finance, but the primitive barely exists onchain despite years of attempts by protocols. On the Arbitrum Platform, traders can access deep perps and spot liquidity yet have no venue for real options flow. LayerV is building that venue, pairing the market structure and risk engineering that made Deribit the dominant options exchange with the DeFi-native distribution the team already proved on BNB Chain, where their prior product generated $43M+ in revenue
T3tris helps asset managers go onchain. No compromises. Today, the infrastructure either doesn't fit professional strategies, costs too much, or requires permission to access. T3tris removes all three. Deploy a vault, attract capital, and run any strategy from day one on the Arbitrum Platform.
Over half the borrowing capacity on DeFi lending markets sits unused. Lenders earn yield but their borrowing power does nothing. Borrowers are stuck with conservative LTVs that limit leverage and trigger early liquidations. Twyne is the credit delegation layer that connects both sides, built on top of Euler and Aave.
Moving money across emerging markets still means fragmented rails, slow settlement, and compliance headaches for every institution involved. Capa already solved this on the Arbitrum Platform. $2M ARR, $150M monthly TPV and +30% MoM growth.
Real estate tokenization has stalled in DeFi because protocols can't underwrite idiosyncratic property risk. USDre takes the opposite approach: instead of putting individual properties onchain, it standardizes real estate financing into a single fungible credit primitive that protocols can use as collateral. It's the missing liquidity layer between real estate credit markets and onchain capital.
Billions in Tron USDT sit idle across emerging markets because users want yield, but not DeFi complexity, CEX opacity, or trust risk. Reinforce.fi gives them xUSD: a self-custodial onchain dollar that provides transparent market-neutral yield strategies on the Arbitrum Platform.
Emerging fund managers have real strategies, but launching a hedge fund takes months and heavy ops. Tilt Protocol turns a strategy into an investable tokenized-stock fund you can launch and run in one place. Anyone with alpha can become investable without months of setup. Already live on Robinhood Chain testnet with launched strategies from independent funds.
AI agents are transacting onchain but have no financial identity. They have activity but no standardized credit history. Performance, but not underwritten credit capacity. Access to rails, but not structured access to capital.
bond.credit is building the credit layer for autonomous finance: onchain scoring, TEE-verified algorithms, and monitored credit vaults, all live on the Arbitrum Platform.
High-value transactions in LATAM rely on slow, trust-dependent high risk traditional payments. Kustodia puts the money itself onchain. Live on the Arbitrum Platform with real escrow type transactions using MXNB, including the first real estate,vehicle and services escrows executed onchain.
What Can Early-Stage Teams Expect
The Mentorship Program runs for eight weeks and kicked off on April 13, 2026, and is built to back early-stage teams launching their products on the Arbitrum Platform.
The first month focuses on supporting early-stage teams on building their onchain products with sessions led by industry leaders across product strategy, go-to-market, liquidity design, distribution and fundraising.
Throughout the program, each early-stage team is paired with a dedicated mentor, working through biweekly 1:1s and ongoing feedback as they build with ecosystem industry leaders, including Pendle, Variational, IOSG, and Horizen Labs.
The second month shifts into execution. Teams refine their product and go-to-market through focused workshops and prepare for pitching with investors via curated introductions and a final $100K prize Demo Day - with participation from partners like Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Lightspeed and Tandem by Offchain Labs.
The top three teams will receive $100K in non-dilutive awards recognizing standout execution and progress.
Opportunities for Early-Stage Teams
As the programmable economy continues to take shape, more early-stage teams are looking for the right environment to build, ship, and grow their products onchain.
The Arbitrum Foundation’s next Open House heads to London bringing the same build-first format that kicked off in New York. It starts with an online Buildathon and culminates in an in-person Founder House, where teams work alongside industry leaders, join hands-on workshops, and compete for prizes.
For early-stage teams ready to turn ideas into real products and build in the programmable economy, this is where it starts, on the Arbitrum Platform.