Original Author: ALL16 Demo Day Overview
Alliance
Original compilation: Yuliya, PANews
Amid AI noise and crypto market volatility, real innovation is quietly gaining momentum. Alliance, which previously incubated standout projects like Pump.fun and Pendle, has unveiled its ALL16 cohort. Among the 18 graduating companies, stablecoin payments, AI applications, prediction markets, and RWA tokenization have emerged as the core themes. Applications for the ALL17 cohort will close on March 25.
Here are the detailed profiles of these 18 ALL16 startups:
Fintech and Stablecoin Payments
Allod: Enterprise-Grade Stablecoin Bank
Allod (allodfinance.com) enables businesses in emerging markets to instantly and cost-effectively transfer U.S. dollars using stablecoins, bypassing bank manual compliance reviews that flag one-third of wire transfers as suspicious, with a false positive rate exceeding 97%.
Allod handles fiat onboarding and off-ramping, counterparty compliance, and key management within a software package similar to a regular bank account. The founders studied computer science at UC Berkeley and co-founded Fei Labs, which launched a decentralized stablecoin that raised $1.3 billion and became one of the top ten stablecoins by market capitalization.
Superbank: Pre-funding Liquidity Solution
Superbank (superbank.co) helps fintech companies pre-fund fiat bank accounts at affordable costs without taking on excessive debt or equity dilution.
Unlike traditional methods of assessing long-term business viability, Superbank primarily underwrites payment channels, providing loans secured by settlement funds that typically settle within 1 to 3 days.
The platform automates manual processes by providing funding via API. Its founder previously established Penta, one of Europe’s largest digital banks, which was later sold to Qonto for $250 million. The core team has nine years of collaborative experience.
Crebit: Stablecoin Payments for International Students
Crebit (crebitpay.com) provides international students with a faster, cheaper way to pay tuition fees across borders using stablecoin-based foreign exchange transactions.
By partnering with local banks to support regional payment methods such as PIX and Bre-B, Crebit eliminates SWIFT fees entirely.
Brazil’s largest bank, Itaú, has designated Crebit as its official study-abroad partner. The founding team includes members from Stanford University, Amazon, NASA, and MIT.
Inflow: Stripe for cross-border small and medium-sized enterprises
Inflow (inflowpay.com) enables any small or medium-sized business to accept card payments from around the world at affordable rates.
By rebuilding its merchant technology stack on a stablecoin rail, Inflowpay outperforms traditional providers that charge 10% fees and take weeks to settle, leveraging existing connections to secure banking contracts that typically take years to obtain.
Its founders include the founding engineer of an MPC wallet startup and a former founder who built a seven-figure revenue bootstrapped business.
Tradevu: A Stablecoin Bank for African Businesses
Tradevu (tradevu.co) provides instant financing to small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa at affordable rates by underwriting real trade activities, such as shipping data, counterparty information, order velocity, and payment behavior.
By building credit around verified transactions, Tradevu funds viable businesses often excluded by traditional trade finance models, and integrates financing with payments to enable seamless deployment of funds across suppliers, currencies, and borders.
Its founder previously founded Pivo (YC S22), deploying over $8 million in funding for small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa, and also founded Jalo, which was later acquired by a YC company.
Prediction markets and trading platforms
Predexon: A Unified API for Prediction Markets
Predexon (predexon.com) simplifies development on prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi.
Developers can use Predexon’s market matching engine to deduplicate and consolidate markets from different platforms into a single unified interface. Additionally, developers can connect to real-time data pipelines to access historical and live data, and execute trades across platforms through a single integration. Its founders are former college roommates from the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Engineering, with experience working at Amazon and AWS.
Freeport: Tradable News Feed
Freeport (freeportmrkts.com) delivers real-time alerts on breaking news, accompanied by live trading and analysis, enabling retail investors to trade news instantly.
The platform uses AI agents to continuously update market data, identifying optimal trading opportunities from news headlines about tokenized stocks and perpetual contracts available on Hyperliquid. Its founders previously studied mathematics and computer science together and worked at IMC and Jane Street.
Hadron: Proprietary AMM as a Service
Hadron (hadron.fi) enables token teams to easily and cost-effectively launch their own proprietary AMM on Solana.
By reverse-engineering and generalizing the mathematics behind the black-box proprietary AMM that handles over half of Solana’s transaction volume, Hadron enables any token project to customize its pricing and exchange logic, ensuring that every liquidity pool is operational across all major DEX aggregators on its launch day. Its founders come from the Solana Foundation and Alchemy.
Worm: Leveraged Prediction Market
Worm (worm.wtf) provides traders with capital-efficient leverage for predicting markets. By using a liquidity provision protocol with dynamic hedging and a liquidation engine, Worm enables users to gain leveraged exposure to prediction markets on aggregated order books (initially supporting Polymarket and Kalshi) for optimal execution.
Its founder previously left their product manager role at Facebook to lead Aave’s product development and later served as Chief Product Officer at Rarible. The co-founder is a gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Ratio: A social application for prediction markets
Ratio (ratio.you) helps retail traders by allowing them to easily view the actions of top traders and follow them with a single click, enabling quick and simple market predictions.
Top traders earn rewards while expanding their audience and driving trading volume, becoming influencers within the copy trading and creator monetization flywheel.
Its founder previously scaled a previous startup to over 100,000 users and has work experience at Coinbase and a fintech unicorn.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Intelligence
Givance: Legal representative of the law firm
Givance (givance.ai) automates law firm operations by connecting autonomous agents to the firm’s entire technology stack. Lawyers can delegate tasks such as client intake, communication, billing, and collections to agents, reducing administrative costs and increasing billable time.
This is significant for approximately 200,000 law firms in the U.S. that operate without staff. Its founder previously exited two startups successfully and has experience working at Google Research, Snapchat, and YC S23.
Deconflict: The Palantir of financial crime
Deconflict (deconflict.com) protects financial institutions from fraud by directly connecting user data with law enforcement data.
When law enforcement flags suspicious activity, Deconflict sends instant alerts to cryptocurrency exchanges, banks, and other money transfer institutions to freeze funds before the transfer occurs, without disclosing sensitive case details. More than 800 law enforcement agencies from 26 countries are currently onboarded to the platform. Its founder has 22 years of law enforcement experience, including service with the U.S. Secret Service. The co-founder previously led the artificial intelligence team at Apple Intelligence.
Couch: AI Companion for the Visually Impaired
Couch helps visually impaired users browse the web; unlike traditional screen readers that force users to listen to each element on a page one at a time, Couch runs as a lightweight browser extension.
It first uses AI to understand the page, then displays only the essential content, such as actions users can take (like booking the cheapest flight or filtering results). Its founders spent 15 years building tools at Meta and Cloudflare.
Akara: On-site intelligence for sports events
Akara (akaramarkets.com) provides retail traders with affordable, low-latency sports betting edges.
By deploying a ground-based scout network at live events, Akara uses AI to convert real-time audio into actionable intelligence faster than TV broadcasts, which lag by 30 seconds, and at a fraction of the cost of data sources priced above $200,000 annually and available only to institutions. Its founders come from Morgan Stanley (quantitative trading), Palantir, Duke University (Ph.D.), MIT, and Jane Street.
RWA Tokenization and Web3 Infrastructure
On-chain StockX
Graded (graded.world) allows collectors to instantly and securely trade any collectible—physical or digital—anywhere in the world.
By aggregating collectibles from existing markets—including on-chain and off-chain—and serving as a custodial and settlement layer, Graded unlocks value trapped in the $350 billion physical collectibles market within collectors’ portfolios. Its founders previously built a crypto digital bank whose stablecoin assets under management peaked at $100 million.
Lucent: Tokenized Life Sciences
Lucent (uselucent.io) enables retail investors to purchase private biopharmaceutical assets, specifically drug IP and royalty exposure, rather than just the companies behind the products.
Biotech companies are tokenizing on Lucent because it enables them to raise funding for individual drug assets without diluting their capitalization table. Three venture-backed biopharmaceutical companies have already signed up to develop therapies for neurology and rare diseases. Its co-founders studied at Yale and Cornell and previously built a nine-figure health tech company and a billion-dollar biopharmaceutical company.
Bluvo: The Plaid of the crypto space
Bluvo (bluvo.co) provides a white-label API for DeFi applications to seamlessly and securely integrate directly with any CEX.
By designing a new authentication workflow and reimagining security best practices, Bluvo enables applications like Polymarket to easily transfer funds from CEXs through user-friendly processes—a feature that is often both fragile and expensive to build internally. The team consists of serial entrepreneurs who previously built an algorithmic crypto trading firm with $100 million in trading volume.
PreStocks: Tokenized Pre-IPO Shares
PreStocks (prestocks.com) provides immediate liquidity for retail investors of any size to enter and exit pre-IPO shares.
Each token is backed by a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) and a customized market-making engine capable of delivering accurate real-time pricing and reliable on-chain liquidity. Since its launch in August, PreStocks has achieved over $350 million in trading volume, addressing liquidity and pricing delays in private equity. Its founders have been active in crypto since 2013, were early engineers at Canva, and have completed 50 pre-IPO transactions over the past year.