How Pantera’s Paul Veradittakit spots crypto unicorns
Veradittakit explains the sectors he’s interested in, how raising for Fund V is going, and what he looks for in the companies he invests in.
Pantera and releon8211/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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“I’m always trying to figure out where the puck is going,” Pantera’s Paul Veradittakit told me.
It’s a key part of how Veradittakit determines whether or not he’s interested in investing time and, of course, money into a project.
Veradittakit’s been around the industry for over a decade. If he hadn’t joined Pantera, he might have been one of the first employees at Coinbase. Instead, he and Pantera founder Dan Morehead decided to invest in companies that were building like Coinbase in other parts of the world.
Veradittakit said Pantera’s invested in 22 unicorns, with him taking the lead on 17 of them.
He’s now focused on finding the next winners of this cycle, especially since times have changed and, well, you know the rest. His bread and butter is Series A rounds, which are when a firm raises significant capital for the first time.
Veradittakit said there’s a bit of flexibility in a seed round, but that isn’t the case for a Series A. In order to put money behind a firm, he’d need to see it as a billion-dollar company, and his focus is on hunting for those future unicorns.
“While a founder is great, I’m looking for someone who will not stop until they succeed. Someone hungry, someone who won’t take no for an answer, will continue to find answers to problems,” he told me. Bonus points if they’re constantly information-seeking.
“The other thing that I look at is if the company already has a product. Then I want to see that the product is something that clients and customers love…It’s even better if we’re able to use the product ourselves; then we could even provide a lot of value just from us being an investor.”
Fund V
Pantera is in the middle of raising for its next big fund: Pantera Fund V.
“Our last fund was $1.25 billion; this fund is targeted to be a billion…Quite a bit of interest from existing investors and new investors…We’re excited because there are a lot of companies right now that are hitting their stride,” he explained.
“We are a multi-stage firm, so we can now see companies…getting to Series B and beyond… We’re starting to see protocols that are finding product market fit that we can buy off of treasuries, and so there’s a lot of opportunity, especially [as] capital markets that are opening up, the IPO markets, we could be investing in those types of companies.”
For Veradittakit, perhaps the most exciting factor is that the friendlier US environment has encouraged founders and developers to build on American soil. Forty percent of Pantera’s capital has gone to projects outside of the US in the past, and Veradittakit is optimistic they’ll balance that out with the inclusion of more US-based companies.
VC Coins
One topic I wanted to get Veradittakit’s take on: the critiques of VC coins, or projects that give venture capitalists large allocations.
Veradittakit understands where the frustration comes from, noting that in 2017-2018, “a lot of investors made a lot of money, and then retail got rugpulled.” Those events are probably cyclical, happening when the market’s hot, he added.
“I think having vesting schedules and more alignment between VCs and entrepreneurs in terms of building for the long term is very important…Having more transparency around investing schedules and all of that is also going to be important for retail, so that they know what they’re getting themselves into, right? You only feel bad when you feel like you’re getting blindsided,” he told me.
As the industry matures, Veradittakit believes we’re going to see more projects go from having a very small team from the get-go and taking on more of a startup feel with executives and, for example, a business development team.
Pantera, he added, aims to help projects that it invests in (obviously, they’re going to want said projects to succeed), with a focus on hiring, tokenomics and governance.
What’s next
Veradittakit and I also hit on what interests him and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t these days.
In conversation, he highlighted staking, insurance and infrastructure plays (though not L1s), and also “things that make moving assets and providing security and insurance across a multi-chain world [easier], and [which make] it very easy for developers to provide the best user experience.”
Then, of course, projects at the intersection of TradFi and crypto — including stablecoins, RWAs, tokenized stocks, etc. And, finally, consumers.
“Especially with consumer companies now feeling more comfortable to launch a token, I think we can really start seeing consumer-facing products get traction and have participation from the users, whether it’s in the US and beyond.”
Which, he believes, will benefit DeFi, gaming, consumer finance and DePIN.
However, Pantera’s still not very exposed to hardware.
“It’s just a very capital-intensive business. There would have to be…a seed-stage company and something that was just so cutting edge that we couldn’t pass [it] up,” Veradittakit told me.
Pantera has also undertaken some AI investments, but they’re sidelining AI for the most part to see how the tech plays out. Veradittakit assured me it didn’t impact his belief that tokens could be used as AI incentives and AI agents which, in his view, could represent a “killer use case” for crypto.
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