Development platform Hydrogen is one of seven companies selected to participate in the Mastercard Start Path accelerator program. The six-month virtual program for later-stage startups is designed to help these firms scale, land strategic investments, and forge key relationships with some of the world’s largest banks and FIs.
“We are proud to be part of Mastercard Start Path,” Hydrogen shared from its Twitter account earlier today. “We’re excited to partner with them as we continue to build the future of commerce.”
Hydrogen offers a set of fintech and blockchain APIs that enable a range of financial services including banking, investing, savings, and insurance. The company provides developers with a toolkit of configurable APIs, an integration library and standardized data model, as well as business logic and modular interface components, giving them the resources they need to build end-to-end apps and solutions.
The Mastercard Start Path program begins with a global pitch day and three-day, international program kick off. During the six-month program that follows, participants will receive support from a dedicated sponsor who serves as a “sounding board and relationship broker” to help startups develop a “unique and relevant” pipeline. Mastercard does not take equity in companies that participate in the program. Instead, it reserves the option to participate in the startup’s next funding round “if and when a strategic fit is identified.”
Jen Langione, Senior Specialist with Mastercard’s Global Communications team, wrote about the importance of innovation and creating value in determining which companies would make the cut. “Innovation is at the heart of Mastercard’s 50-year history,” Langione wrote, “and the cutting-edge technologies being pioneered by the latest group of Start Path companies align to the innovative, value-driven approach Mastercard takes to the solutions it creates and services it offers.”
Joining Hydrogen in the upcoming cohort are:
- BharatPe
- Cyberwrite
- Eurkea AI
- Kasha
- mmuze
- Ziosk
In its statement, Mastercard noted that it received applications from companies operating in more than 210 countries. The program accepts 40 startups per year, and has worked with more than 200 startups since the program’s inception in 2014.
Hydrogen’s Mike and Matt Kane demonstrated the company’s technology at FinovateEurope 2018. At the event, the two co-founders showed how to use the app development platform to build a European savings platform in five minutes. The platform leveraged the blockchain for security and a proprietary AI to offer an interactive digital assistant.
Last month, Hydrogen announced that it won a finalist spot in the South African Reserve Bank’s Fintech Demo Day – along with three other Finovate alums. In September, the company made its app building platform available to Oracle Cloud customers by way of the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Named to the Wealthtech 100 this spring, Hydrogen was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in New York City.