(Bloomberg) -- Robot Ventures, an early-stage investor in crypto startups such as EigenLayer, Lido Finance and Flashbots, raised $75 million for its latest venture-capital fund.
Crypto venture investing has recovered this year with token prices up significantly since their low point nearly two years ago. New York-based Hack VC announced a $150 million fund in February, while Paradigm raised $850 million in June.
“From our experience, one of the things that we found is that in general, we’ve deployed more capital in bear markets simply because we have the experience of having been to multiple cycles before,” Robert Leshner, general partner of Robot Ventures, said in an interview. “When valuations are really crazy, in general, our frequency of investing is slower because we’re a lot more conservative about what we’re willing to pay out for.” Robot Ventures tries to stick to pre-seed and seed funding, he said.
This is the fourth fund by New York-based Robot Ventures and its investors include TrueBridge Capital Partners, Haun Ventures, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon.
“It is a lot bigger of a fund than our previous funds, so we went from like $22 million to $75 million, so roughly 3 times in size,” said Tarun Chitra, general partner of Robot Ventures, who added that the fundraising conversation started in late last year, as institutional investors in the US and Europe started showing interest in crypto again.
Chitra and Leshner founded Robot Ventures in 2018. Chitra also co-founded crypto risk modeling firm Gauntlet in 2018, after he spent about five years at D.E. Shaw Research. Leshner founded decentralized finance application Compound, one of the first projects built in the DeFi sector. Leshner is currently the chief executive officer of Superstate, an asset management firm focusing on so-called tokenization.
Running crypto companies themselves has been an advantage for Robot Ventures when it comes to making investments, the pair said.
“We view ourselves as probably one of the only funds where, ‘hey we’re in the game with you’ because we’re also running companies, we see what’s happening on the ground,” Chitra said. “And I think in crypto the lack of operator experience at the fund level” compared to other parts of venture capital is quite apparent, he said.
Some of the most well-known projects Robot Ventures invested in included Ethereum restaking project Eigenlayer, which received $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz in its latest funding round in February; Flashbots, a provider of software used to package Ethereum blockchain transactions that raised $60 million last year and Together AI, an artificial intelligence startup that announced $106 million in funding led by Salesforce Ventures in March.
With crypto markets experiencing a significant run-up in the first half of the year, the Robot Ventures founders said they expect some of the trends to play out in the rest of the year, including projects built outside the Ethereum blockchain, and the intersection of traditional finance, capital markets and crypto.
“We believe that blockchains aren’t just this island or a singular self-encapsulated bubble for people just to trade crypto,” said Leshner. “The longer value truly comes from a blockchain being used for more than just crypto native assets.”
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