Cryptocurrency investment firm Polychain Capital is raising $200 million for a second fund aimed at venture investing, a funding goal that would top its first venture fund by $25 million.
According to an investor slide deck obtained by CoinDesk, the second venture fund opened at the beginning of 2020 and is accepting minimum investments of $1 million for up to three years. Like Polychain Capital’s first venture fund, the new money will back early-stage crypto startups raising pre-seed, seed and Series A funding rounds.
The first venture fund, which raised $175 million from investors who cut checks normally between $500,000 and $5 million, invested most of its capital by the end of last year after launching in the first quarter of 2018, according to the Polychain slide deck. The capital, the deck says, was split 40 percent to startups that improved on existing blockchain infrastructure and 60 percent to startups that explored less-tested industry concepts.
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The second venture fund was registered in December of last year, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents. The deck does not indicate the amount Polychain Capital has raised for the second venture fund. Polychain Capital declined to comment on funding progress and specifics due to investor restrictions.
Blockchain networks with enhanced privacy, engineering and flexibility will be prioritized in the second venture fund, the deck says, piggybacking on existing investments in cloud platform Dfinity and blockchain interoperability projects Cosmos and Polkadot.
With its first fund, Polychain says it sought exposure to cryptocurrency exchanges and custodians through the investments that were considered foundational to the industry, a strategy that homes in on Polychain’s banner investment, Coinbase, the San Francisco-based crypto exchange and tech unicorn.
More novel investments in the flagship venture portfolio, meanwhile, trended toward decentralized financial entities – digitized financial instruments and brokers that self-regulate themselves and avoid manual oversight while often settling in crypto. So far, Polychain has backed decentralized finance (DeFi) powerhouse MakerDAO, margin trading book dYdX, blockchain bank Dharma and lending protocol Compound, among others.
Venture trajectory
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To date, none of Polychain Capital’s reported venture fund investments has issued a public offering or been acquired. Such exits traditionally allow a fund to cash out its holdings in a portfolio company and deliver sizable returns to fund investors.