(Bloomberg) -- Alan Howard, the British hedge-fund billionaire, isn’t the only crypto advocate in the family. His son, Daniel Howard, and a colleague have raised $25 million for a new venture-capital fund that will focus on the digital-asset sector.
Halo Capital, based in New York, was officially announced this week by the 27-year-old Howard and Bhavin Vaid. Both were most recently at crypto-focused private equity firm 10T Holdings.
In an interview, the pair said they want to bring the mindset of growth investors to early-stage projects. Unlike many venture investors in crypto that concentrate on a specific ecosystem such as Bitcoin or Solana, Halo invests in all categories from Bitcoin to the decentralized artificial-intelligence sector.
“We hadn’t really seen many venture capital investors in the space with this background of a traditional growth equity fund,” Howard said. The pair thought that a “great way for us to be value-added investors in the space, but also for us to have an impact, was to be a much more generalist fund focused across the entire ecosystem,” he said.
The two started fundraising efforts in May and officially launched the fund in September. It already has invested in a few projects, including Bima Labs and Andrena. By leveraging their network, Halo has also brought in about 20 partners to the fund, ranging from company founders to research experts, to advise the two and their portfolio companies, they said.
“One thing that we’ve noticed is a lot of the existing funds in the space are potentially just biased, based on other investments they might have made over the past three to five years,” said Vaid. “Our ability to take a differentiated approach, and a research and data-driven one, is going to be vital.”
Howard and Vaid declined to share the names of investors and partners, citing privacy reasons. Howard said that his background helps “to an extent,” but the uniqueness of their fund is what makes Halo attractive to investors and their partners.
Howard said he “fell down the crypto rabbit hole professionally” about three years ago. Prior to that, he spent most of his career in computer science and artificial intelligence, following the completion of his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Columbia University. Vaid worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Cerberus Capital Management after he graduated from Dartmouth College.
10T Holdings, where Howard and Vaid met, counts Alan Howard as an investor. The elder Howard is one of the biggest backers in the digital-asset sector. His Brevan Howard Asset Management formed its crypto arm BH Digital in September 2021.
(Adds comments in seventh paragraph. A previous version of this story corrected the month of fundraising and launch in fifth paragraph.)
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