A venture capital firm focused on cryptocurrencies, web3 and blockchain startups has raised its third investment fund of $650 million.
Dragonfly Capital raised previous funds in 2018 and 2021 of $100m and $225m respectively.
Based in San Francisco, it has backed almost 60 companies to date including Avalanche, a lightning-quick verifiable platform for institutions, enterprises and governments which came out of nowhere months ago to break into the top 10 most valuable currencies by market cap.
The new fund includes heavyweight VCs Tiger Global, KKR and Sequoia Capital China.
Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, wrote in a blog post that the new fund will back “the most disruptive founders, protocol builders, and hackers of this generation”.
“We used to talk about how the revolution was coming. Well, it’s here now. Crypto has gone mainstream, but we’ve been doing this from the beginning, before any of it was obvious,” he said.
“We’ve been early supporters of projects like Avalanche, Near, Bybit, Matter Labs, Anchorage, Amber, Frax, Cosmos, Dune Analytics, MakerDAO, Compound, 1inch – to name just a few.
“Back then, most of these were half-baked ideas. Would DeFi really work at scale? Was there room for another L1? Could zero-knowledge proofs be used to scale public blockchains?
“The answers were: yes, yes, and yes. With the right team and enough ingenuity, a crazy idea can change everything. We’ve seen it enough times to no longer doubt it. The landscape is not fixed, no matter how much it seems like it might be.
“So much is going to change over the next five years. The next generation of startup founders are now emigrating from web2. The L1 wars are heating up, the race to build the metaverse is on, DeFi is maturing, crypto gaming now seems inevitable, and the financial infrastructure is institutionalising.
“There’s so, so much to build, and with our Fund III, we’re better equipped to back founders all along their journey, from seed to Series B and beyond.
“We’re excited to be a small part of how the future of crypto gets built.”