Funding Roundup: Halo Capital, Asylum Ventures make debuts

It may have been a quieter week when looking at the amount of venture capital raises or funds announced — but the ones that did issue announcements this week made a bit of a splash. 

First up we have Halo Capital, which is a new fund launched by Bhavin Vaid and Daniel Howard, the son of Alan Howard. 

The $25 million fund is focused on investing through a data-driven and research-based approach. The two, both veterans of growth equity fund 10T, said they’ll be taking a generalist approach to the space. 

“The industry is constantly evolving at both the infrastructure and application layer, and we believe the best way to capture value is by investing across a broad range of subsectors,” Howard said in a statement.

“We’ve seen increased demand from investors for funds with a generalist approach to the space. By being research and data-driven, we’re able to identify and invest in exceptional opportunities across the entire digital asset ecosystem.”

Vaid added: “No other allocator has effectively merged traditional research, quantitative data science, and a flexible crypto-native approach to investing in the token economy.”

The fund has already made two investments in a DePIN project called Andrena as well as Bima, a protocol focused on creating a stablecoin collateralized by bitcoin. 

“The token economy has matured, with multiple new launches each year exceeding $1 billion in fully diluted values, and many existing tokens naturally appreciating in price to surpass $1 billion market caps. We believe the invention of the token as a novel liquidity mechanism has created a robust token economy that is now at a stage where the ecosystem can and should be valued based on both traditional and crypto-native metrics,” Vaid said. The firm will act as “hands-on angel investors.”

Speaking of new funds, Halo wasn’t the only one to make a debut this week. Asylum Ventures, a $55 million generalist fund, was also announced.

Notation Capital founder Nick Chirls — which invested in projects such as Solana and NEAR — is the general partner at the new fund. Jonathan Wu, former head of growth at the Aztec Network, joined as an investment partner. 

“I’ve always believed the best early-stage founders are artists — they’re obsessive about new and unusual things, they feel compelled to bring creation into the world, and they are often misunderstood for long periods of time–even lifetimes. Building businesses is their art,” Chirls wrote.

Other notable rounds:

• Cybersecurity firm Hypernative said it raised $16 million in a Series A. Bloccelerate, Boldstart Ventures and CMT Digital were among the participants.  
• Puffpaw, the vape-to-quit smoking crypto project built on Berachain, raised $6 million in a round led by Lemniscap. Volt Capital and Folius Ventures were among the participants.

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