a16z, a private American venture capital firm, has unveiled a $4.5 billion crypto fund. According to the firm, $1.5B will be dedicated to seed investments, and $3B to venture investments.
The VC firm will deploy the fund to invest in promising web3 startups at every stage. This new fund now brings its total crypto/web3 funds raised to over $7.6 billion.
“We think we are now entering the golden era of web3. Programmable blockchains are sufficiently advanced, and a diverse range of apps have reached tens of millions of users. More importantly, a massive wave of world-class talent has entered web3 over the last year. They are brilliant and passionate and want to build a better internet,” the company said.
“We are excited about developments in web3 games, DeFi, decentralized social media, self-sovereign identity, layer 1 and layer 2 infrastructure, bridges, DAOs & governance, NFT communities, privacy, creator monetization, regenerative finance, new applications of ZK proofs, decentralized content & story creation, and many other areas.”
a16z says it will also keep growing its operating teams so that it continues providing the best services to founders. its operating functions include:
- Research and engineering, help its portfolio companies solve their most important technical challenges in areas like cryptography, mechanism design, protocol design, and tokenomics; as well as conducting original research to advance the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
- Security, which helps in areas like key management, smart contract auditing, and formal verification, along with application and infrastructure security.
- Talent and people, which helps with recruiting executive, technical, and product talent, plus developing organizational frameworks to support scaling.
- Legal and regulatory, which helps will help its portfolio companies navigate regulatory uncertainty, and charts pathways for DAOs and decentralization.
- Go-to-market, which helps with marketing, communications, content, growth, strategic partnerships, and more.
The firm has also called on founders, developers, creators, or any other type of builder in web3 to get in touch.
