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Inside Solana Incubator Cohort 4: AI Agents, DePIN Capital, Productive Stablecoins, and Tokenized Equity

Coral OS, Fractals, Neutral Trade, Solomon Labs, and Spout Finance share their pitches, traction, and roadmaps after three months building with Solana Labs in New York.

Generation Infinity
By Generation Infinity

Solana Labs wrapped its Cohort 4 Demo Day in New York City this spring, sending five startups out the door after three months building alongside the Labs team. According to incubator head Emon Motamedi, the round set a record for applications and produced the most competitive pool the program has ever seen. Most cohorts run six teams, but Cohort 4 ran with five because only five applicants stood “head and shoulders above” the rest during interviews. As a result, Motamedi kept the bar high rather than fill the extra seat, and the lineup reflects that selectivity across every pitch on Demo Day.

The Cohort 4 Thesis

Motamedi frames each cohort around real-world Solana adoption, and Cohort 4 stayed true to that framing while stretching across very different industries. Teams arrived from agentic AI, real-world assets, and decentralized physical infrastructure networks, and they entered at very different life-cycle stages. Some came with a live product already in market, others came pre-launch with go-to-market work to do, and a third group came at the idea stage and still shaped their target customer in real time.

Motamedi also pointed to how the cohorts have matured since the program began. Cohort 1 mostly built infrastructure pieces that did not yet exist, while Cohort 4 now builds on top of that foundation and ships much closer to end users and enterprises. Regulatory clarity has shifted in the same direction. Early cohorts navigated heavy U.S. compliance uncertainty, but today’s teams can focus more on product than on jurisdiction risk, and that change shows up clearly in the boldness of each Demo Day pitch.

Coral OS: An Environment Layer for AI Agents

Coral OS calls itself a platform for everything between an agent and production, covering registry, runtimes, security, and orchestration in a single stack. Co-founders Roman Georgio and Caelum Forder lead the company as CEO and CTO, and their pitch centers on what Pete from Coral OS described as “horizontal scaling of intelligence.” In his framing, Coral OS helps developers squeeze more out of frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, so the platform stays deliberately model-agnostic.

The product set includes four pieces that work together for enterprise teams. The Coral Marketplace lets teams discover and monetize enterprise-ready agents, and the Coral Console handles testing, debugging, and compliance monitoring. The Coral Server then orchestrates agents from any framework, while Coralizer wraps legacy APIs and MCP endpoints into agent-compatible interfaces without any code changes. Coral OS targets telecom network operations, multi-agent enterprise apps, and financial advisory workflows, and Pete sees an open, decentralized ecosystem of trusted AI agents as the end state. Furthermore, he believes the shift can produce abundance rather than dislocation as the technology spreads.

Motamedi noted that AI permeated Cohort 5 applications too, with roughly a third to half of the next pool building AI products. Notably, about 15 percent of applications were entirely AI-written, which speaks to how quickly the category is reshaping early-stage company formation.

Fractals: A Financial Layer for DePIN

Fractals tokenizes distributed infrastructure networks on Solana, starting with DePIN as its first wedge. The company sits inside the broader Fractal family originally founded by Justin Kan and Robin Chan, which raised $35M in 2022 from Paradigm, Multicoin Capital, a16z, Solana Labs, and Coinbase Ventures. Since then, the team has pivoted from gaming NFTs to DePIN capital markets, and Cohort 4 marked the new positioning’s first major showcase.

Cameron from Fractals laid out the supply-side problem clearly during his pitch. DePIN operators run cash-intensive businesses on the ground, but their only revenue source has historically been token rewards, and that gap leaves them struggling to fund hardware expansion. Fractals solves this with a two-sided model. Operators raise USDC against future emissions on one side, while investors buy fractional pieces of cash-flowing hardware on the other side, and each shard maps to a specific physical device.

Active network partners include Xnet, Geodnet, Helium, Hivemapper, ROVR, 375ai, and FliteGrid. According to Cameron, Helium already serves several million AT&T and T-Mobile customers daily, and Geodnet’s RTK network powers drones and certain robot vacuums in everyday use. Cameron also flagged a coming shift for mature DePINs. Some networks now run seven and eight-figure revenue rates, so moving from token-based payouts to USDC payouts starts to make sense, and Fractals plans to bring drone-detection network FliteGrid on-chain next.

Motamedi compared the model to an IPO for DePIN operators. Investors gain exposure to real-world infrastructure returns they could not access otherwise, and operators gain capital they could not otherwise tap.

Neutral Trade: Institutional Quant Without the $1M Ticket

Neutral Trade curates institutional-grade quant strategies on Solana for retail-sized capital. Co-founder Derek told Genfinity the team has raised over $200M for trading firms across two years of building, and the platform targets 10 to 20 percent returns with low drawdown and low volatility. Strategies span two main categories: market-neutral vaults that run basis trading, funding rate arbitrage, and relative value, alongside directional vaults that run trend-following, momentum, and macro positioning.

The platform sources curated trading firms and lets retail allocate to them through non-custodial smart contract vaults. Anchorage supplies institutional Solana access, while Copper and CEFFU provide off-exchange settlement on the trading venues themselves. Each curator passes through KYB, a track-record review, and live testing with Neutral’s treasury before launch, so allocators only see vetted strategies. The minimum deposit sits at $100, which is what makes the institutional access actually retail-accessible.

Backers include Solana Labs, Enzyme Finance, and Skyland Ventures, with angels coming from IMC Trading, Cubist, and Phantom. Derek described a sharp shift in how the team thinks about returns after the NYC stretch. Before the incubator, the team focused on generating high yields, but after meeting Wintermute, Auros, and GSR, the team now leads with custody, audits, and risk limits in every conversation. That feedback now shapes the institutional roadmap, and next on the build list are tokenized vaults, an integration with Phoenix DEX, and permissionless strategy creation for traders building directly on Phoenix.\

Solomon Labs: A Stablecoin That Pays You for Holding It

Solomon Labs is building USDv, a Solana-native yield-bearing stablecoin designed to earn while it sits in a wallet. Founder Ranga C, who goes by 0xRanga, walked Genfinity through a thesis built on a clear gap in today’s market. Most stablecoins behave as static balances, where the reserve asset earns yield but the holder rarely sees it, so users have to move capital into a staking product or savings instrument to capture any return. USDv changes that mechanic by earning by default, even while the token sits idle, and critically it keeps earning while deployed into DeFi positions like liquidity pools.

The system runs on what Solomon calls an economic policy layer, which decides who is eligible to earn, in which context, and under which rules. As a result, the protocol can scale beyond a single stablecoin, and Ranga sees the same framework supporting other assets and other issuers over time. Solomon Labs raised $8M in a public sale on MetaDAO that drew $102.9M in commitments from 6,603 contributors, more than twelve times oversubscribed. The token priced at $0.80 for a fully diluted valuation near $20.6M.

USDv has run in private beta since late 2024, and the protocol reports a beta yield rate near 20.9 percent APY with no loss events to date. According to Ranga, the team is wrapping a final audit before public launch in the coming weeks. Motamedi singled out Solomon as a deep subject-matter expert team that pushes investors into new frames during a pitch. The protocol could extend yield distribution far beyond stablecoins, so the ceiling on the platform sits well above its first product.

Spout Finance: Borrowing Against Tokenized Equities at Zero Percent

Spout Finance built a lending and borrowing platform for tokenized equities, and founder Marc Ryan compared the architecture to Aave or Kamino at a high level. However, Spout flips the interest model in a way TradFi could not. Instead of charging borrowers, Spout runs an investment strategy on their collateral off-chain, and the yield from that strategy subsidizes lenders. Therefore the borrow rate sits at zero, which is what gives the product its hook.

Spout currently runs a covered-call strategy as the engine under the hood. According to Marc, this kind of structure was not previously possible in TradFi, so the team frames Spout as a utility layer for tokenized stocks rather than a clone of an existing money market. The platform has already drawn early validation across multiple programs. Spout finished second at the Chainlink Hackathon in the tokenization track, secured a $50K Pharos grant, and the team reports near $10M in soft TVL commitments ahead of full launch.

Marc sees the bigger unlock arriving with pre-IPO tokenization and the next wave of public listings going on-chain. The recent SpaceX listing already pushed tokenized stock volume sharply higher, and self-custody also lets holders sidestep counterparty risk on traditional brokerage accounts. He also offered a candid take on accelerators in general. Most programs run on generic workshops that founders can replicate with five minutes of research, but Solana’s program stood out, in his view, because it connected him to real operators across crypto and finance.

What the Founders Took Away

Several themes came up across the round-robin close, and the biggest one was feedback velocity. Pete from Coral OS said tight feedback loops sharpened the company’s positioning around horizontal scaling, while Cameron from Fractals emphasized weekly business reviews and daily office hours with Motamedi and outside VCs. Network compression mattered just as much. Derek’s Asia-based Neutral Trade team gained direct access to U.S. allocators, market makers, and VCs in a single quarter, and his team also met Anatoly Yakovenko, founders from Phantom and Indiegogo, and senior figures across the Solana Foundation. Marc Ryan summed up his stance on accelerators bluntly, calling most of them low-value workshop machines, but he called Cohort 4 the first program he has joined that actually produced real value.

The Forward Look

Forward statements from the cohort point to a clear shared thesis on where the market is heading. AI mind share will eventually normalize, in Marc’s view, and capital should then redistribute toward chains with proven throughput and low fees. He expects Ethereum and Solana to stand at the top of that next phase, alongside a small group of TradFi-focused chains like Arc and Tempo. Cameron expects DePIN to keep maturing as networks shift reward models toward USDC payouts, while Derek expects on-chain quant strategies to grow 100x as tokenized equity perpetuals go live. Ranga expects stablecoins to power the next major wave of tokenized assets coming on-chain, which dovetails directly with Marc’s pre-IPO unlock thesis.

Motamedi closed with a broader frame that ties the whole cohort together. Crypto today functions as infrastructure for product builders, so the next era looks less like “crypto adoption” and more like every business becoming AI-enabled and crypto-enabled by default. Cohort 4 ships into exactly that backdrop, with five teams attacking five different wedges of one shared thesis on what Solana can support when builders get out of their own way.

*Disclaimer: News content provided by Genfinity is intended solely for informational purposes. While we strive to deliver accurate and up-to-date information, we do not offer financial or legal advice of any kind. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with qualified professionals before making any financial or legal decisions. Genfinity disclaims any responsibility for actions taken based on the information presented in our articles. Our commitment is to share knowledge, foster discussion, and contribute to a better understanding of the topics covered in our articles. We advise our readers to exercise caution and diligence when seeking information or making decisions based on the content we provide.

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