Exclusive: Ex-Chorus One CIO launches $20M crypto fund
Frachtis is focused on pre-seed and seed rounds in both consumer apps and AI
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Ex-Chorus One CIO Xavier Meegan is launching a $20 million crypto native pre-seed fund, we’ve exclusively learned.
At Frachtis, Meegan holds the role of General Partner with four others on an investment and advisory committee, including Chorus One’s Brian Crain and Felix Lutsch. The fund is based in Lisbon, Portugal.
“There are five of us around the fund right now, and all of us have experience operating crypto-native businesses, which I think is kind of rare. There are only a few funds in the space that do that. Mix that with the fact that we also have experience operating blockchain infrastructure,” Meegan told me.
He said that they’d raised over the past 12 months, and noted that crypto’s currently in the “consumer apps era. The next big winners in crypto will be applications that leverage the infrastructure we already have.”
The infrastructure days, he told me, “are over.” It’s time to focus on building for the future of crypto, instead of launching more L1s and L2s, he added. Instead, he sees the demand focusing on consumer and mobile apps.
Though he’s also interested in the crossover between AI and crypto, adding that he’s closely watching AI agents.
“One big thing there, which we have another thesis around, is that these agents need way faster and more contextualized data, for example. And so, we need to build this infrastructure. Maybe the agents need certain permissions to access certain things; otherwise, there’s going to be a lot of security risk there,” he said.
“AI personalization, retention, and also loyalty of certain kinds of apps is going to get more and more important as there’s more and more stuff going live in crypto. I think that’s going to be a way that some of these teams can win: by using AI to enhance your applications, enhance the usability, enhance the engagement for the users.”
Right now is a “great time” to invest, Meegan told me. It’s been difficult for founders to raise, which has had the unforeseen benefit of forcing founders to strengthen their ideas.
He expects, over the next 12-18 months, to see LPs come back and get a bit more active.
“Everything we’ve invested in…had a long-term thesis around, and I’ve spoken with many teams…I believe [are] going to win long-term. And we have a framework for how we do this, actually, and how we analyze these founders and teams that we’ve developed over several years,” Meegan added.
Frachtis has invested in eight projects so far, over pre-seed and seed stages — including Turtle Club and Hyve. And they’re just getting started.
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