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

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

article-image

Thesis CEO Matt Luongo

share

key takeaways

  • In September, Thesis will launch its fifth studio project, a Web3 wallet, to the public.
  • Investors in the round include: ParaFi Capital, Nascent, Fenbushi Capital, Polychain Capital, Draper Associates, Kain Warwick, James Prestwich, Viktor and Lisa Bunin, and Josh Cincinnati.

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.

Tags

Upcoming Events

HYATT REGENCY SALT LAKE CITY

TUES, OCT. 8, 2024

Guided by the expertise of Blockworks Research Analysts team, this one day event will feature senior leaders, entrepreneurs, and developers from across the crypto industry. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in an immersive experience to explore the latest trends, […]

Salt Lake City, UT

WED - FRI, OCTOBER 9 - 11, 2024

Pack your bags, anon — we’re heading west! Join us in the beautiful Salt Lake City for the third installment of Permissionless. Come for the alpha, stay for the fresh air. Permissionless III promises unforgettable panels, killer networking opportunities, and mountains […]

recent research

hivemapper.jpeg

Research

We believe crypto market participants overlook Hivemapper’s fundamental potential due to a poor understanding of both the niche map data market and Hivemapper’s positioning relative to incumbents. Hivemapper’s token model catalyzes both a cost and product advantage via unmatched map freshness and near real-time accuracy, which is its wedge into a market characterized by stale data and high data collection costs. Its current and potential future product suite may represent one of the strongest possibilities for PMF in crypto today.

article-image

Exploit shows centralization can sometimes be an asset

article-image

The Fidelity Ethereum Fund, like other proposed ETH ETFs, seeks to stake a portion of its assets, according to the firm’s Wednesday registration statement

article-image

The DAO first voted on enabling SAFE transfers over a year ago

article-image

The final Bitcoin halving, where the mining reward becomes smaller than one satoshi, is expected to occur in 2140

article-image

The Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced back-to-back lawsuits against KuCoin Tuesday