Funding Roundup: Paradigm shows VC strength with $850M fund

This week ended with a bang as Paradigm announced it raised $850 million for its third fund.

Now to be fair, Bloomberg got ahead of the news and teased back in April that Paradigm was aiming to raise between $750 and $850 million. 

Don’t get me wrong, venture capital is still below 2021 and 2022 levels, but this fund shows that crypto’s clawing its way back after a brittle winter, as our very own Michael McSweeney wrote in the Empire Newsletter Friday. 

But, as McSweeney pointed out, $850 million is a far cry from the $2.5 billion fund the firm raised in 2021. 

Pitchbook’s Robert Le warned Blockworks in April that it may be too early to think a bull market is upon us. The first quarter of the year is off to a good start so far, but it’s clearly still below the highs of last cycle.

Read more: What the Roman Empire and crypto have in common

“Bitcoin has monetized to $1T+. Ethereum, Solana and other blockchains are scaling. Stablecoins are being adopted globally. Frontier research speeds along. New infrastructure is enabling consumer applications. Hundreds of millions of people own crypto. And crypto is now a main character on the world’s political stage,” Paradigm wrote in its announcement. 

While it’s not yet clear what kind of projects Paradigm is looking to invest in, the firm pointed to its investments in Uniswap and Optimism as the types of “early-stage work that we love contributing to” and “what we’ll be increasingly focused on going forward.” 

Other notable raises: 

• Nuffle Labs, a spin-off of NEAR Foundation, raised $13 million in a mix of a strategic grant from NEAR and an investment led by Electric Capital.
• Ava Protocol announced it raised $10 million in seed funding across two rounds of $5.5 and $4.5 million, respectively. 
• Squads Labs raised $10 million in a Series A led by Electric Capital and participation from Coinbase Ventures and RockawayX. 
• Manta Network unveiled a $50 million EcoFund. 

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