Upright Ventures Wants Your Startup to Find Its First Users

A startup accelerator can get a founder into a room with investors. Upright Ventures is interested in another doorway: the one inside a customer’s wallet. Through Celo Camp and its MiniPay Launchpad, the company helps founders build applications for an environment where people can actually encounter them. For a young business, that is a more demanding assignment than making the last slide of a pitch deck look expensive.

The appeal is practical. A developer building a payment product needs more than a blockchain that works. Someone must explain the integration, challenge the business model and introduce the right people. Then comes the question that survives every presentation: who is going to use this? Upright assembles a program around those overlapping needs, giving founders a timetable and an ecosystem to work within.

A camp with no sleeping bags

Upright’s recognizable product is an eight-week virtual accelerator. Celo Camp, created and run with the Celo Foundation, combines business guidance, technical help and introductions. Participants can join remotely. The destination is concrete: a working product on Celo, the blockchain ecosystem around which the program is organized.

Teams meet Upright to set goals, receive mentor matches based on their needs and update their progress on a virtual platform. Workshops cover different stages of the startup journey. One founder may need technical advice; another may need help explaining the business. Treating those as separate assignments is more useful than delivering the same inspirational lecture to everyone.

Celo Camp’s FAQ reports more than $300 million raised by alumni since 2020. That measures financing secured by participating businesses over time. It does not tell a reader how much Upright invested or how much of that fundraising the program caused. The figure supplies context for the network, while individual products tell the more interesting story.

The wallet gives the homework a destination

MiniPay sharpens the proposition. Opera introduced the stablecoin wallet inside its Opera Mini browser in 2023, beginning in Nigeria and extending into other African markets. Stablecoins are digital tokens designed to track a reference value, commonly a currency. An app built around them still needs a reason for someone to open it tomorrow.

Upright’s MiniPay Launchpad gives teams a specific distribution setting to consider. The opportunity is to make something useful within a wallet rather than assume that customers will discover a new standalone application. That changes early product questions: which transaction matters, where does the customer begin, and what must happen before the money reaches its destination?

In its Batch 8 account, Bingtellar described developing a MiniPay remittance application that would let customers send money across Africa using cUSD. In the cohort’s public project discussion, Greybox described building cross-country payments, establishing relationships with providers that connect traditional money and crypto, and improving its user experience. Those are recognizable business chores, even when the plumbing is unfamiliar.

Other participant notes show how broad the work becomes. Atsur reported refining its revenue model and onboarding, using MiniPay for moving between conventional money and crypto, and continuing to build customer interactions. The lesson is straightforward: an integration does not finish the product. It reveals the next set of decisions about pricing, access and how people behave.

“a well-organized structured accelerator program.”

Butian Li, co-founder of Blockless, in an Upright testimonial

The operator behind the introductions

Alon Shavit is listed as Upright’s co-founder and CEO. His public professional history dates that role to July 2019. The company’s website also names Rachel Jakob as COO, Matt Kenny as program manager and Immanu’el Segol as tech lead. The mix captures the work: recruit and organize people, help them build, and keep a program moving.

Upright sits between several groups with different priorities. Founders want useful advice, financing and customers. Blockchain ecosystems want applications and developers. Distribution partners want products worth placing in front of users. The operator has to turn those ambitions into meetings, deadlines and deliverables. Its public program proposals show ecosystem funding paying for that organizing work.

The company describes a community of more than 250 teams and 650 developers across more than 65 countries. These are community totals, not a count of paying customers. Its public-facing character is international and conversational: mentors, founder testimonials and repeat cohorts. The service depends on the quality of those relationships as much as on the curriculum.

Eight weeks can travel; the technical help must change

The 2025 Starknet Accelerator shows how Upright applies the format elsewhere. Its program offered support with fundraising, strategic partnerships, market entry, technical development, token economics and regulatory questions. It targeted existing teams seeking growth and a stronger fit between their product and market, while also welcoming Web2 businesses integrating Starknet.

The format remained virtual and eight weeks long. The technical context changed. A founder joining a Starknet program needs help relevant to that network, just as a MiniPay builder needs people who understand the wallet. That specificity is Upright’s useful distinction within a crowded field of accelerators, grants and startup courses.

The Starknet website now says the 2025 program has concluded and applications are closed. Its published schedule placed demo day on August 5, 2025. A founder evaluating the offering should treat it as a completed example of Upright’s work, rather than assume that a familiar application button means a cohort is currently accepting teams.

Support has a price tag

The public Celo Camp 2025 proposal put $248,800 against operations and marketing, $100,000 against investment in teams, and $25,000 against an in-person event. Together, those proposed allocations total $373,800. They describe a program budget, not tuition charged to an individual founder or audited spending after the event.

The discussion also changed the plan. After feedback on investment sizing, Upright said it revised proposed tickets to a $5,000-$25,000 range and reduced the investment pool to $100,000. That exchange is a useful glimpse of governance doing ordinary budget work: a stakeholder questions a number, and the operator adjusts it.

For readers building their own program, the distinction matters. Money reserved for startups cannot also pay for the people running the accelerator. Comparing programs requires asking what the operating spend delivers. Mentor access, technical work and distribution introductions are services; their value depends on what teams can do with them.

The numbers improve when you ask what they count

The Batch 9 report recorded 16 graduates, of whom 14 demonstrated a MiniPay or Celo integration with a demo and an open-source repository. It also highlighted Pretium Finance’s listing on MiniPay, enabling Lipa Na M-Pesa payments. These measures get closer to usable products than an application count alone.

The same report described 33 sessions and more than 40 hours of live programming. It is tempting to call a crowded calendar a result. The stronger questions come afterward: did the team ship, did the integration work, and did it serve a recognizable need? Pretium’s payment use case supplies a clearer answer than the hours spent on calls.

Batch 10 ran from September 29 to November 21, 2025. Upright’s retrospective reported 11 graduates from 12 teams and live Celo demonstrations from every graduate. Five projects had either joined MiniPay or were under review; the report identified KLIQ and MiniPlay as onboarded. Combining accepted and pending projects into one success figure would overstate the result.

Investment decisions followed. In February 2026, Upright announced $33,334 investments in Coinstancy and iExchange. In March, it named zeno.vision as the final recipient, completing the stated $100,000 cohort pool. The sequence matters: graduation, distribution and investment are separate steps, each with its own selection process.

The part a founder can steal

Upright also offers a less intensive route. Startup Pathway’s 2024 challenge invited builders to launch an open-source Celo project in 30 days, with resources and opportunities for support. That gives the company a way to reach people beyond the selected accelerator cohort. A self-guided challenge and a mentor-intensive program solve different problems.

A founder can borrow the underlying discipline without borrowing the brand. Choose a specific user journey. Set a short deadline. Find an adviser who understands the technical obstacle. Put the work somewhere it can be inspected. Ask for feedback on the product people can touch. These are editorial lessons from the documented program design, not a promise that participation produces a viable business.

The conditions matter. A team seeking customers outside the partner ecosystem may find a narrowly focused accelerator less useful. A product needing lengthy research may resist an eight-week schedule. A wallet listing can create an opportunity for discovery, but repeat use still depends on whether the application does something worth returning for.

Upright’s most interesting contribution is the arrangement of the work: founders, technical advisers and potential distribution partners gathered around a bounded assignment. The customer remains the examiner. After the workshops end and the demo-day windows close, the application has to earn another visit.