0G and xBuilders Issue Final Call for $20M Apollo AI Accelerator Cohort 2

Applications close November 11. The four-month program offers up to 10 AI startups up to $2M in investment per project and mentorship with veteran operators from Google, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft and more.

San Francisco, CA, Oct. 28, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 0G, the trust layer for AI, and xBuilders, a team of Stanford veterans who have run accelerator programs for Google for Startups and StartX, have issued a final call for applications to Cohort 2 of the 0G Apollo AI Accelerator, an up to $20 million program for AI startups.* Applications close on November 11, 2026. They are reviewed on a rolling basis, and founders who apply early get priority.

Cohort 2 will select up to 10 AI startups for a four-month program running from November 2026 to February 2027, with up to $2 million in investment available per project.* It is open to AI founders building revenue-generating products, from early stage to growth stage, who are ready to build on 0G AI infrastructure.

Mentorship with veteran operators

Each accepted team works with mentors drawn from veteran operators from Google, Salesforce, Zapier, Plaid, Amazon, Microsoft, xBuilders, Canonical and more, alongside the 0G team. Cohort 2 has also confirmed speakers and mentors from Google DeepMind and Google for Startups, and a partnership with security audit firm Hashlock. More speakers, mentors and partners may be added before the program starts.

What Cohort 2 offers

Accepted teams receive:

• Up to $2,000,000 in investment per project, subject to due diligence, project evaluation and program terms*
• Mentorship with veteran operators and the 0G team
• Direct access to 0G engineers for integration support
• Partner perks across security audits, finance, legal, cloud and marketing services
• Demo Day at the end of the program, plus an in-person graduation on the Stanford campus

The program runs in three blocks: four weeks of programming starting in November, covering product strategy, AI and technical deep dives; a focused build sprint from December to mid-January; and four weeks in January and February on go-to-market, operations and legal, and fundraising, ending with Demo Day and graduation. The program is primarily remote, except for an in-person graduation at Stanford toward the end of the program.

How Cohort 1 did

The first Apollo cohort of 10 teams was selected from more than 220 applications and graduated at Stanford in July 2026 after a ten-week program. According to 0G, the cohort has drawn more than 100 intro requests from investors, enterprises and partners since its Demo Day.

"Cohort 1 showed us what happens when serious AI founders get real infrastructure and real investors around them early," said Michael Heinrich, CEO of 0G Labs and a Stanford alumnus. "Cohort 2 is for founders who want to build AI that people can verify and trust, and we want to back them from the first line of code to Demo Day."

"Working across consulting at McKinsey, product at Amazon and venture capital has taught me how much the right support at the right time can matter for founders," said Weisi Yuen, Chief Strategy Officer at 0G Labs, who leads the Apollo Accelerator. "With Cohort 2, we're connecting founders with mentors and partners who understand the challenges they face, from finding their first customers to raising capital, so they don't have to figure everything out alone."

Cohort 1 founders describe the mentorship in their own words on the Apollo website:

"The Apollo mentors are expert in the places every startup needs, multiple deep-dive calls working through product market fit, fundraising, networking and much more. That kind of sustained, substantive help is uniquely Apollo Accelerator," said Wyatt Benno, Co-Founder of ICME, which builds verifiable controls for AI agents.

"The Apollo mentors have been excellent on GTM, and the events the team organized generated real client leads for us. This is exactly what you want from a program," said Jon Ozdoruk, Co-Founder of DSALTA, which builds an AI agent for compliance automation.

Timeline

• November 11: applications close
• During review: shortlisted founders submit a five-minute video and take one interview call
• November: up to 10 teams announced
• November 2026 to February 2027: program, with Demo Day at the end and an in-person graduation at Stanford

Apply at apollo.0g.ai. Questions about the program: apollo@0g.ai.

*Investment amounts are subject to due diligence, project evaluation, and program terms. Actual funding may vary.

About 0G

0G is the trust layer for AI and a frontier AI lab. It trains its own foundation models, including the 0GM series, and builds the harness, safety, and verification layers around them. Its stack combines these with private compute and encrypted storage, designed to enable AI work, from inference to agent actions, to be verified and audited. Learn more at https://0g.ai.

About xBuilders

xBuilders is comprised of veteran founders, operators, and investors from Google, Salesforce, Capital One, and Coinbase, who have extensive experience running accelerators across AI, Fintech, and Blockchain. The team teaches the MS&E447 AI Sovereignty & Entrepreneurship course at Stanford University's School of Engineering, runs the Stanford Openlab Open Source AI Seminar, and has run the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator for the last 5 years, helping 85+ projects collectively raise over $1B from leading funds with multiple unicorn successes. The xBuilders team has also run AI accelerators for Cornell/IC3, and has extensive experience building and operating the Google for Startups accelerator program for dozens of cohorts across AI, innovation, and software technologies. Accelerator programming is based on Stanford University's startup methodologies and courses, and the extensive experience of the team as founders, operators, and investors running accelerators for SBA, Google for Startups, StartX, and Cardinal Ventures.

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