Crypto Venture Studio Thesis Raises $21M and Plans to Launch New Wallet

Cryptocurrency venture production studio, Thesis, has completed a $21 million Series A fundraising round. The company plans to expand its venture capital to a wider audience in the future and launch a new project to the public in September. 

Investors in this round include ParaFi Capital, Nascent, Fenbushi Capital, Polychain Capital and Draper Associates, and individual investors like Kain Warwick, James Prestwich, Viktor and Lisa Bunin and Josh Cincinnati. Existing investors from previous funding rounds include Polychain Capital, which participated in this round, Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, and Paradigm.

The seven-year-old company’s portfolio includes a consumer payment app, Fold; a privacy layer for public blockchains, Keep; an automated market maker, Saddle; and an open-source initiative like tBTC that serves millions of its users and holds over $300 million in total value locked. 

Fold was the world’s first bitcoin-backed rewards card with over $20 million in sales activity a month. Fold raised $20 million total as it partnered with Visa to bring bitcoin to consumers and drive mass adoption of cryptocurrencies, the company said. 

Across the company’s whole portfolio, Thesis has raised about $75 million to date, CEO Matt Luongo told Blockworks in an interview. 

The company plans to use the investment as a catalyst to further ecosystem growth and launch new Thesis projects. “This investment validates the Thesis model and will enable us to scale the studio and ultimately allow our operation to be self-sustaining in the years to come,” Luongo said.

In September, Thesis will launch its fifth studio project, a Web3 wallet, to the public, Luongo said. The project began because Thesis saw a gap in wallet experiences and wanted to create a better experience and infrastructure for crypto-based wallets.

“The wallet ecosystem is a wreck. This has been a theme since 2014,” he said. People want a cross-chain experience that makes sense with decentralized finance across their wallets, so they don’t have to constantly work with a bunch of applications to do basic single wallet activity, Luongo said. 

Luongo also believes wallets should be community and user owned. The Web3 wallet is “not about enriching [Thesis] behind the curtain, but enriching users,” he said. As new infrastructure continuously fills the crypto space, Luongo said he wants to make sure people building in this space create open sourced products with a focus on communities and users owning it, not the companies. “If everything is close-sourced, it’s just a glorified bank,” he said. 

Up until this round, Thesis raised funds independently for each project, Luongo said. “For me, a lot of this round is being able to stop fundraising,” and be “large enough” that the company can invest in itself, he said. 

“We’ve raised for individual projects, but with Thesis we find people who care about the values in the space and won’t have control over (the products)” because the users will have control, Luongo said.