Blockchain Capital, one of the most established venture capital teams in crypto, saying on Monday that it had raised $580 million for two separate funds, one of the largest crypto fundraising announcements of the year.
The company will allocate $380 million to what it calls its “early stage” fund, or money to invest in seed or Series A rounds, a spokesperson said. Fortune. And $200 million is for its “opportunities” fund that will provide capital for a startup's later stages of fundraising.
Blockchain Capital, which has invested in cryptocurrencies for a decade, began raising capital for the two funds in the fourth quarter of 2021, just before the cryptocurrency market began to falter and then crash months later. The fundraising officially closed on Monday and was just $20 million shy of its initial goal of $600 million, said Spencer Bogart, general partner at Blockchain Capital. Fortune. (The company had planned to raise $400 million for its early-stage fund and $200 million for its opportunity fund.)
Bogart declined to provide the exact percentage breakdown of limited partners or investors in the two separate funds, but said the majority come from large family offices, followed by pensions, endowments, foundations and other investment partners. Many taxpayers are regular investors, he said, and the recent market crisis has not scared them away.
"Over time we become very desensitized to those cycles," he added, "and I think a lot of them have, too."
Blockchain Capital's fundraising is a ray of hope for blockchain boosters amid a comparatively dismal funding landscape for crypto-VCs and startups.
In the first half of 2023, venture capitalists alone invested $2.3 billion in cryptocurrency startups, a 75% decline from the same period in 2022, according to data from tone book. And as capital has dried up, leads for some startups, especially those specializing in non-fungible tokens, have dried up. without.
However, that does not mean that the limited partners have rejected cryptocurrencies. CoinFund, another crypto VC, Announced in July it had raised $158 million to back blockchain startups. AND Fortune reported that Polychain Capital, another stalwart of the crypto VC landscape, recently had its first close—of around $200 million—for its fourth fund. Polychain still plans to raise around $400 million in total.
Bogart declined to say how much Blockchain Capital has raised before and after the FTX collapse. However, he did say that he and his partners have already deployed a significant amount of the $580 million they have raised (about a third), including recent investments in Own laboratories and RISCZero.
And, unlike some crypto VCs who have turned their heads In a pivot in response to the siren song of AI, Bogart said Blockchain Capital's focus remains exclusively on cryptocurrencies.
“We have things that are working,” he said of cryptocurrencies, “and a lot more things are going to work.”
