Konvoy Ventures Launches $150M Fund To Back Web3, Gaming Firms
The investment firm is aiming to fund 30 early-stage companies over the next two and a half years
Blockworks exclusive Art by Axel rangel
key takeaways
- Konvoy Ventures, which previously backed ailing crypto gaming developer Sky Mavis, has launched a new fund aimed at budding games studios
- Web3 tech, platforms and other various techologies will be the target of the fund, Konvoy said
Early-stage investment firm Konvoy Ventures said Wednesday it has rolled out a multimillion-dollar fund for budding gaming companies focused on a number of verticals including Web3.
Dubbed Konvoy Fund III (KFIII), the new $150 million fund will focus on pre-seed, seed and Series A funding for those companies creating assets across multiple industries including education and healthcare, according to a statement.
Following the launch of KFIII, Konvoy said its managed assets would rise to $270 million. Despite a declining interest for Web3 tech, Konvoy is hoping its latest fund will help connect investors to projects both in the budding blockchain sector as well as traditional games studios.
“The pandemic was an adrenaline shot to the gaming industry because more and more people turned to games as a source of entertainment and also a way of staying social with their remote communities,” Konvoy Managing Partner Jason Chapman said in the statement.
The venture capital firm launched its second fund in 2020 — worth around $65 million — in a bid to capitalize on growth in the gaming sector.
Founded in 2017, Konvoy focuses mainly on the North American, European and African markets with plans to expand further into Latin America, India, South Korea and Southeast Asia, it said.
The Denver-headquartered firm’s portfolio consists of 33 companies that have collectively raised $450 million in follow-on funding and have backed blockchain gaming developers, including the once praised Sky Mavis, creator of Axie Infinity.
Konvoy also participated in an $8.3 million funding round for NFT game Genopets last year.
The popular Axie has all but fallen flat on its face in recent months, reflected in the weekly NFT (non-fungible token) sales volume on its platform, which declined by more than 99% since its peak in November — dropping from $753 million to $3 million. Genopets’ native token, GENE, is down more than 77% from its all-time high of $37.79, also a November peak.
Still, Konvoy said the $200 billion video gaming industry, as well as the blockchain and crypto industry, presented a myriad of other opportunities for it to execute its “proactive and thesis-driven” approach.
“This new fund will not only allow us to focus on additional geographic regions but also new types of companies and technologies,” said Jackson Vaughan, another of Konvoy’s managing partners. “If there’s one main learning from this period [the pandemic], in which the world has undergone unprecedented disruption, is that there is such an enormous opportunity ahead of us.”
Konvoy said it plans to expand its team to 15-20 people by the end of 2023 and will seek to deploy more capital to around 30 early-stage companies over the next two and a half years.
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