Build in
the Bear.
Cuscuton is a bear market web3 accelerator by the team behind Graviton. We are assembling a $250K capital pool from small cheques to back five obsessive teams shipping in the quietest, most productive part of the cycle.
After the graviton, the cuscuton.
In modified gravity theory, the cuscuton is a peculiar scalar field. It carries no propagating degrees of freedom of its own, yet it constrains the geometry of spacetime with infinite sound speed. It is causally instantaneous. It is a boundary condition wearing the mask of a particle.
Graviton was the mediator. It carried force through the last cycle, through eight teams, four exits, and the network of funds that now sit at the LP table with us. Cuscuton is the constraint. It is the shape we press onto the next cycle, not the force that moves through it.
A bear market is a boundary condition. Prices compress. Attention thins. Only teams with real conviction remain in the arena. Our job is to be the constraint that keeps them upright while the market decides what the next primitive will be.
The team is back. The
cycle is different.
Graviton Web3 Accelerator ran through the last bull. We shipped cohorts, ran demo days at Token2049 and ETHGlobal, and stood alongside teams that are now defining their categories: Spydra in enterprise onchain infrastructure, Fetcch.xyz in payments abstraction, Zoth.io in institutional RWA. The names ended up on the LP rosters of HashKey, 369, Moonrock, and the funds that most emerging managers spend a fund cycle trying to reach.
Cuscuton is the same operators, deliberately reshaped for the bear. We are not trying to run the Graviton playbook again. The Graviton playbook was built for a market with too much liquidity and too little discipline. This one is built for the opposite.
We are raising a $250K capital pool in small cheques from angels, operators, and friendly funds. Every dollar is deployed into five teams. No SPVs stacked around a hot round. No index of forty. Five founders. Twelve weeks. One high-signal check.
Four beats we are
writing cheques against.
Bear markets pick the primitives
The last bear gave us restaking, intents, and account abstraction. Real primitives get built when the mercenary founders have already left the room. We are here to fund the ones who stay.
Small cheques, sharp conviction
A $250K pool deployed into five teams changes the shape of a $50K cheque. It is not a fund index. It is a seat at the earliest table with a partner who has run the playbook before.
Graviton network as gravity well
Every team we back plugs into the same LP and fund network we spent Graviton building. HashKey, 369, Moonrock, Woodstock, IOSG, Polygon Ventures. Warm intros only.
Distribution before token
We index on teams shipping products before tokens. Payments, RWA, enterprise infra, consumer wallets. Categories where the next cycle will demand real user pull, not just an incentive curve.
Teams from the last
cohort still shipping.
Ten teams. Four categories. The pattern that repeats across every winner is founder obsession with a real user problem, and a distribution wedge that does not require a token to prove itself.
The Graviton team,
back with Cuscuton.
Shawm was the Accelerator Lead and CMO at Graviton Web3 Accelerator. He ran the program end to end: sourcing, cohort ops, demo day, and the LP conversations that closed rounds into HashKey, 369, and Moonrock. He is the person founders in the network call at 2am before they send a term sheet.
Before and around Graviton he has been embedded on the growth and go-to-market side of teams that now sit at the top of their categories: Spydra on enterprise onchain infrastructure, Fetcch.xyz on payments abstraction, Zoth.io on institutional RWA. He has written narrative for products before they had a website, then watched those products carry the narrative onto onchain rails a year later.
With Cuscuton he is stepping back from the cohort-of-thirty model on purpose. Five teams. Twelve weeks. One partner in the room who has done this before.
Shawm in convo with
web3 founders.
The Pod is a long-running conversation series Shawm ran with some of the sharpest minds in web3, most of them recorded before the market had heard their names. The tape holds up. The names went on to build the categories the industry now takes for granted.
We are reopening the series under Cuscuton, out of Zo House, Whitefield. Long form, on the record, and unhurried. Founders talking about the primitive they are actually building, not the one they are pitching this week.
Founders welcome.
If you are a web3 founder shipping something real and you want a seat at the table, write in. Interviews are recorded in person at Zo House, Whitefield.
shomprakash@gmail.com$250K bear market
accelerator fund.
Assembled from small cheques. Angels, operators, and friendly funds.
Every dollar in the pool is deployed into the Cohort 01 cheque set.
Standard cheque per team. Room for a follow-on out of the operator network.
The pool is closing in tranches.
If you are an operator, angel, or fund GP who wants exposure to a curated bear cohort without the fund-of-funds overhead, we are opening a small syndicate around this pool. Reach Shawm directly on Telegram or through the application form below with a note in the summary field.
Transmit signal
for Cohort 01.
Everything on this form is read by Shawm. If you cannot fit your logline in one line, the answer is you have not written it enough times. Applications close when we lock the five.