Polygon Founder Raises $50M For Web3 Fund

The new launch comes as venture capital firms in the space continue to raise money despite crypto winter.

article-image

Blockworks exclusive art by Axel Rangel

share

key takeaways

  • Symbolic Capital is backing emerging founders and early-stage decentralized applications
  • The funding follows $500 million in combined raises by CoinFund and Shima Capital last week

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal has raised $50 million for a new venture fund focused on early-stage Web3 startups. 

Nailwals’ firm, Symbolic Capital, is backed by a number of undisclosed venture arms of crypto exchanges and family offices, as well as fellow venture capitalists.

Symbolic is set to offer advisory and recruiting services for its portfolio companies, as well as public relations, marketing and auditing services. 

Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Cere Network, has joined the startup as a partner. The duo have co-invested in more than 40 companies together — including Axie Infinity, Yield Guild Games and Biconomy — since meeting at Binance Labs in 2019.

The fund’s mission is to foster mass adoption of blockchain technology and Web3, the founders said in a statement. It seeks to support consumer-facing decentralized applications — such as zero-knowledge proof or metaverse apps and those that drive interoperability between blockchains — as well as NFT startups and the broader business of creators and influencers. 

Loading Tweet..

The fund has already invested in more than a dozen projects, including Web3 gaming studio BlinkMoon, Polygon-based metaverse Planet Mojo and e-sports platform Community Gaming.

The move comes after Shima Capital’s private crypto fund raised about $200 million, Blockworks reported last week. The firm’s limited partners include hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly Capital. 

The same week, digital assets specialist firm CoinFund took in $300 million for its latest venture vehicle that plans to supply capital in later funding rounds. CoinFund, run by venture capitalist David Pakman, has invested roughly $1 billion in seed-stage startups since 2015. 

The startups have commenced operations in the midst of what market participants have dubbed a crypto winter, indicating a growing interest in opportunistic strategies as both private and liquid digital asset markets have presented bargains for deep-pocketed investors.

Venture capitalists invested $9.3 billion in crypto companies in the first six months of 2022, according to Crunchbase data — down from $12.5 billion during the same period last year.


Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your inbox every evening. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter now.


Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday