Polychain Capital Is Raising a $200M Crypto Venture Fund, Slide Deck Reveals

Cryptocurrency funding agency Polychain Capital is elevating $200 million for a second fund geared toward enterprise investing, a funding aim that will prime its first enterprise fund by $25 million.

In keeping with an investor slide deck obtained by CoinDesk, the second enterprise fund opened initially of 2020 and is accepting minimal investments of $1 million for as much as three years. Like Polychain Capital’s first enterprise fund, the second fund will again early-stage crypto startups elevating pre-seed, seed and Sequence A funding rounds.

The primary enterprise fund, which raised $175 million from traders who minimize checks usually between $500,000 and $5 million, invested most of its capital by the top of final yr after launching within the first quarter of 2018, in line with the Polychain slide deck. The capital, the deck says, was break up 40 % to startups that improved on present blockchain infrastructure and 60 % to startups that explored less-tested business ideas.

The second enterprise fund was registered in December of final yr, in line with U.S. Securities and Change Fee (SEC) paperwork. The deck doesn’t point out the quantity Polychain Capital has raised to date for the second enterprise fund. Polychain Capital declined to touch upon funding progress and specifics as a result of investor restrictions. 

Blockchain networks with enhanced privateness, engineering and suppleness can be prioritized within the second enterprise fund, the deck says, glomming on to present investments in cloud platform Dfinity and blockchain interoperability tasks Cosmos and Polkadot.

With its first fund, Polychain says it sought publicity to cryptocurrency exchanges and custodians via the investments that had been thought of foundational to the business, a technique that properties in on the Polychain’s banner funding, Coinbase, the San Francisco-based crypto alternate and tech unicorn.

Extra novel investments within the flagship enterprise portfolio, in the meantime, trended towards decentralized monetary entities – digitized monetary devices and brokers that self-regulate themselves and keep away from guide oversight whereas typically settling in crypto. Thus far, Polychain has backed decentralized finance (DeFi) powerhouse MakerDAO, margin buying and selling ebook dYdX, blockchain financial institution Dharma and lending protocol Compound, amongst others.

Thus far, none of Polychain Capital’s reported enterprise fund investments has issued a public providing or been acquired. Such exits historically enable a fund to money out its holdings in a portfolio firm and ship sizable returns to fund traders.

Buyers in Polychain Capital, or restricted companions, have reportedly counted know-how enterprise capital companies Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund and Union Sq. Ventures – a few of which have co-invested in Polychain portfolio corporations. 

SEC filings present that property throughout all Polychain Capital funds dipped from $967.eight million iin August 2018 to $595.1 million in March 2019. The entire property accounted for cryptocurrencies, fairness in firm investments and unspent investor cash as valued on the time the disclosure varieties had been filed.

Of these funds, Polychain Capital claims within the new investor deck that its cryptocurrency asset fund – a hedge fund launched in 2016 that trades short-term and long-term positions of digital property – manages some $550 million. The deck, which seems to have been produced in or after October 2019, notes that the hedge fund is concurrently taking investments north of $1 million on a rolling foundation.

An early pioneer within the crypto VC house, Polychain Capital was based in San Francisco by Olaf Carlson-Wee, the primary worker and former head of threat at Coinbase. Polychain CTO Rob Witoff and Polychain common companions Sam Rosenblum and Aurora Harshner are additionally alumni of Coinbase.

The 2 govt companions apart from Carlson-Wee and Witoff – President Joe Eagan and joint COO-CFO Matt Perona – hail from conventional finance backgrounds. Perona was CFO of Criterion Capital from 2012 to 2018. Eagan was beforehand COO of Tiger Legatus, a client inventory hedge fund.